


Far From the Tree

by youweremycrown



Category: Boruto: Naruto Next Generations, Naruto
Genre: F/M, Family, Family Angst, Family Feels, Family Fluff, Gen, Major Illness, OCs and also a jutsu that I am making up as I go along, Protective Uchiha Sasuke, Sasuke is trying his best, boruto and sarada have cute crushes on each other but are too shy to do anything about it, i hate when characters come back from the dead but i couldn't help it, i just want the uchihas to be happy, mental health, sasuke being domestic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:20:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 33,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25887235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youweremycrown/pseuds/youweremycrown
Summary: Sarada is grateful to have her father in her life again, but the more she gets to know him, the more it hurts that there is a part of their family history—and a part of herself—that is still out of reach.Sasuke knows that the time has come to tell his daughter the truth about his past, but that means having to grapple with demons that he’s spent over a decade keeping locked inside. And when he begins to sense a familiar presence in the village, he can’t tell if it’s a fiction of his troubled mind or a sign that a new danger is on the horizon.Itachi has been pulled from his grave and forced into a wicked contract: He is sent to the Leaf Village to see his brother again and meet his niece—and must bring the Leaf Village down from the inside in exchange.
Relationships: Haruno Sakura & Uchiha Sarada & Uchiha Sasuke, Haruno Sakura/Uchiha Sasuke, Uchiha Itachi & Uchiha Sarada
Comments: 57
Kudos: 210





	1. Bring Me to Life

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Itachi Uchiha is rudely awakened from his time in the afterlife almost twenty years after his death by an enemy with the power to control his every move—and to reunite him with his now-grown brother.

Itachi Uchiha couldn’t remember the last time he was this cold. He was waking up from a sleep he couldn't remember falling into—not awake enough yet to move or open his eyes—and he was shivering so much that even his teeth were chattering. He was so cold, and he was still so _tired_ , and he wasn't even sure where he was. 

“Good morning, sunshine,” a voice on the other side of the room said. Maybe a woman’s voice. He couldn’t really tell. 

He didn’t know that he particularly cared.

He was so tired. And he was so _cold_. And . . . why did it feel like he'd fallen asleep on the floor?

He tried to remember what he was doing before he went to bed. He felt like he'd taken one of those multi-hour, dead-to-the-world, crease-on-your-cheek-from-the-pillows naps, the ones that almost made you feel sicker when you woke up, the ones that made you wish you’d just stayed sleeping. His mouth was dry, and he tried to remember the last time he’d drunk any water. He tried to think of what he’d done earlier that day, before he’d fallen asleep, to try to figure out what day it was.

And then, suddenly, it came to him: Before he’d fallen asleep, he’d been in the woods talking to his brother. He’d looked his brother in the eyes and told him that he loved him. And then . . . .

He’d died.

For the second time, but still.

And now he _felt_ things—cold in his bones, dryness in his mouth, pain in his stomach and his head—and that meant . . . 

_Fuck._

“Send me back,” he said, his voice so hoarse that the words barely came out. “Please.” He didn't want to be inside a human body again. He didn't want to have to feel all the pain again.

He didn't want to have to be _himself_ again. He wanted to go back to sleep, where he didn't have to be that person anymore.

The voice let out an irritated little sigh. “That’s really the first thing you’re gonna say after I bring you back from the dead? Ungrateful little shit.”

He tried to lift his arm up to strike at whoever it was, but his arm didn’t move. He realized that he was still lying on the floor, and that he hadn't even opened his eyes yet. He tried to do so—tried to activate the Sharingan—but instead he felt like his head had been cleaved right in half, and he squinted against the bright light of a migraine headache.

The person sat down in a chair in front of him and crossed one leg over the other.

He opened his eyes a little wider.

It was a woman—tall, slender, with long, thin hair down to her rib cage that was probably brown but could have been a deep, dark shade of purple. She wore a purple dress, and her lips were painted red.

Itachi used all of his strength to push himself into a seated position. _Make a plan,_ he told himself. _Escape. Fight her off._ But even sitting up had made him winded.

"What do you want from me?" he murmured.

“I’m here to make a deal with you,” she said. “Your brother’s in trouble.”

If he'd had the energy, he would have rolled his eyes. "No kidding." He didn't need reminding that his little brother was a rogue ninja who'd gone mad with grief or that they were in the middle of a war. Not when he was responsible, in one way or another, for both of those things.

The woman let out an amused little snort. “Not the trouble you're thinking of. That's the stuff of history books." She tilted her head to the side. “Well, metaphorically speaking. They don't teach about what you did to your family in the Leaf Village nowadays. I’d call that historical revisionism, personally, but that’s not my problem.”

"I don't believe you." But he felt a gnawing sense of dread in his stomach. _The stuff of history books. Nowadays._ "How much time has passed since I died?" he asked.

She quirked up an eyebrow at him. “Oh, I think I’m going to have a _lot_ more fun if I make you go in and figure it out yourself.”

The fact that she wasn't answering could mean that she was lying—that hardly any time had passed at all, and she was trying to rile him up on purpose. Or . . . .

“Why did you bring me back?” Itachi asked. “If you're telling the truth, then Sasuke has friends who can help him out of whatever trouble he’s in. He doesn’t need me.” _I will only make it worse. I will only bring back things that should stay dead._

“I think we can scratch each other’s backs. Aren’t you _desperate_ to meet your brother? Don’t you want to find out what happened to him?”

“I want you to put me back where you found me and leave my brother alone. And if you think I’ll help you willingly—"

“Oh, sweetheart, you’ve been Reanimated before. You know as well as I do that it doesn’t work like that.”

Itachi was suddenly on his feet, his legs crying out in pain from the lack of use. Then he felt his body moving on its own, walking him closer to her, forcing him to kneel at her feet.

She cupped his face in her hands sweetly. It made him feel sick.

“Let me rephrase what I’m trying to say,” she said. “I brought you back, which means that I control you. You are going to go to the Leaf Village and tell me _everything that I want to know._ And in exchange, I'm giving you the chance to see how your brother turned out. How’s that sound?”

He glared at her. _Never in a thousand years will I help you,_ he thought, even though he knew it was useless to say it out loud.

But he couldn't stop the tiny voice in the back of his mind from wondering if what she was saying was true. Wondering if Sasuke had survived the war— _won_ the war—and redeemed himself . . . if Sasuke was okay now, in spite of everything Itachi had done that should have ensured otherwise . . . .

“Why me?” he asked finally. “You could have picked anyone for this. You could have used someone who was alive. _Why_ did you have to bring _me_ back?”

The woman licked her thumb and then dabbed at his cheek, wiping off some of the dirt from his face. “What can I say?” she said finally. “I’m a sucker for a family reunion.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to this story! I've been watching a lot of Naruto and Boruto in quarantine. Even though I don't actually like tropes like time travel or people coming back from the dead, I haven't been able to get the idea of Itachi meeting Sarada and grown-up Sasuke out of my head, and fanfiction has been the only kind of fiction I can convince myself to write in These Trying Times, so here we are. How many chapters is it going to be? Where is it going? All great questions! Are all of the chapters going to be named after songs I first started listening to when I was in seventh grade and watching Naruto for the first time? Probably!


	2. Family Portrait

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On a normal night, Sarada would be thrilled to come home from a mission and find her parents drunk and playing board games together, like normal parents.

Sarada Uchiha’s feet dragged as she walked up the long final stretch of hallway to her family’s apartment. All she wanted was to go to bed. It had been a long, hard day on top of a pile of several other long, hard days: Her week-long mission had stretched out into two weeks, and then the train home had gotten delayed on top of that, and then they’d gotten caught in a torrential downpour—and now here she was, finally getting home at one in the morning, feeling like a drowned rat.

Not to mention the _interesting_ conversation she’d had with Team Seven and Konohamaru-sensei at the train station. An _enlightening_ conversation, in fact. Not so much from what Boruto and Konohamaru-sensei had said, but from what they _hadn’t_.

None of the other stuff—the mission, the train, the rain—would have been hard to deal with, if only that little conversation hadn’t wormed its way deep into her brain.

When she got to her front door, she shut her eyes and let out a deep breath, taking a second to collect herself. _Deal with it in the morning, s_ he told herself. _It’s been a long day. Don’t start an argument about it now._

Then she turned her key in the lock and opened the door. “I’m home—”

She stopped. She could hear her mother cracking up from somewhere in the apartment, hear her father’s deep voice.

She slipped off her shoes and wandered into the living room—where, to her surprise, her mother and father were seated on the floor in front of the table, playing the bright pink version of Jenga that Chocho had given Sarada for her eighth birthday. There seemed to be a gambling component to it, because both of her parents had stacks of potato chips in front of them like poker chips.

There were also two empty bottles of wine on the table, which was really the only explanation that the scene required.

Sarada leaned against the doorway and watched silently for a few moments. She was always curious to see what her parents were like when they thought nobody was watching them.

Her mother was giggling, her cheeks flushed. “All right. Ante up.”

Her mother and father both took three chips out of their pile and pushed them closer to the center of the table. Then her mother peered at the Jenga tower.

“Take that one,” she said, pointing at the most precariously-positioned piece in the pile.

“Are you _shitting_ me?” her father asked.

Her mother was still smiling at him from ear to ear. “Fine. You know the rules. You don't pull the piece I tell you to, I get your chips."

Her father pushed the three chips in front of him across the table to her mother, who took one and, seemingly without thinking about it, stuffed it in her mouth.

Her father snorted. “Eat _one more_ of the chips, Sakura, I swear to God—”

Realizing what she’d done, her mother clapped her hand over her mouth and let out a squeak of laughter.

Her father stared at the Jenga tower, and then chose a piece to remove. But when he'd gotten the piece three-quarters of the way out, the tower started to wobble.

“No—” he said desperately.

The entire tower toppled over—and landed directly on his pile of potato chips, crushing most of them into crumbs.

Ever the stoic, her father didn’t even flinch. He just stared into the middle distance, his mouth pressed into a defeated scowl, his lips unable to resist twitching upwards.

Her mother, on the other hand, was laughing so hard that she was crying. She grabbed onto her father’s wrist and fell against his chest, and her father's face finally cracked into a smile.

If it were a normal night, Sarada would _love_ to see her parents like this. To see them acting goofy, like _normal_ parents did.

It had been a few months since Sarada’s father had taken a more permanent role within the Leaf Village, and it was nice to have him actually _living_ with them: reading the paper while drinking his tea in the morning, watching the news with her mother at night, making Sarada lunch or dinner on the days he had off from his work in the Hokage’s office. They were all little signs that her father really was here for good this time. And on a normal night, the sight of her parents goofing off together would have been _delightful_.

But tonight, it just pissed her off.

Her father noticed her presence and nodded. "Welcome home."

Her mother gasped excitedly and threw her hands up in the air. “ _SARADAAAAAA!_ ” she shouted. “We _missed_ you! How was your mission?”

Sarada straightened up and crossed her arms. “It was fine. You guys didn’t have to wait up for me, you know.”

Her father shrugged. “I didn’t get in that long ago, either. I was with Naruto when Konohamaru called in about the train.”

Her mother patted the floor next to her. “Come sit down. We can fit in one more game before bedtime, and you can tell us all about your mission."

“She turned it into gambling,” her father added, “because of course the apprentice of the Legendary Sucker had to—”

“ _Shush,_ ” her mother said to her father fake-sternly. Then she looked back at Sarada, her face all smiles again. “I _do_ need to teach you how to gamble, though. But it’s not _real_ gambling because we’re using potato chips, so it’s totally fine—”

“Uh, I’m okay,” Sarada said quickly. “I’m exhausted, so I’m probably just going to go right to bed.”

Her mother frowned. “Oh. Are you sure?” She looked a little bit disappointed, which made Sarada feel even worse.

“Yeah. I’ll catch the next game night. Good night!” Sarada waved and headed down the hallway, only letting her face drop when she had her back turned to them.

Once she was in her room and the door was shut behind her, she dropped her bag on the floor, tilted her head back, and ran her hands over her face.

 _Calm down,_ she told herself, as she pulled her pajamas out of her dresser with probably slightly more force than was strictly necessary. _Just go to bed, and in the morning, this won’t feel like such a big deal. Right? Everything’s okay now. Look at how much fun Mom and Dad were having. There’s nothing wrong._

But it _was_ a big deal, and there _was_ something wrong, and it didn’t help when her parents tried to act like there wasn’t. What gave _anyone_ in this family—the high and mighty Uchiha clan, now reduced to two thirtysomethings and their dumbass teenage daughter—the right to pretend that things were _normal_?

For that matter, what gave _everyone in the goddamn village_ the right to pretend that things were normal—to pretend that there wasn’t some massive, horrible truth they were hiding from her—when _anyone_ could see that there was something wrong?

And why was she _always_ the last one to find anything out about her own goddamn family?

* * *

The mission had been fine—long, but fine. It was a low-risk delivery mission, involving bringing a sensitive archaeological sample to a research facility in the Sand Village. But then some rogue ninjas had tried to take the package from them, which got them swept up into a whole side mission about counterfeit art, which set them behind schedule. Which would have been fine.

When they’d finally gotten on the Thunder Rail to go back home, a week later than they’d planned, they’d gotten caught in a horrible rain storm. Which _also_ would have been fine, if the Thunder Rail hadn’t derailed halfway between the two villages. And while ordinarily it would have been faster at that point to just go home on foot, it would take just as long, if not longer, with the storm beating down on them. So they’d decided to cut their losses and wait for the Thunder Rail to get up and running again.

For. Five. Hours.

To pass the time, Konohamaru-sensei had decided that they’d do their typical mission debriefing while they were waiting for the train. And one way or another, the conversation had turned to the nice old man who worked at the research facility—who, when he had learned who Sarada’s and Boruto’s parents were, had gone _on and on_ about those Leaf Village shinobi and the Rookie Nine and the Konoha Eleven, and what a miraculous set of young people had come out of the Leaf Village all at the same time, and how truly blessed everyone was to have had them on their side during the war.

“Why are they called that? The Konoha Eleven?” Mitsuki had asked, as they sat huddled together in the train station, trying to stay as warm and as dry as possible.

“They all get grouped together because they took their first chunin exams together,” Konohamaru-sensei had explained. “The three teams that graduated with Big Brother Naruto—the Rookie Nine, because they all took the exam their first year out of the Academy—and then Neji, Lee, and Tenten, who graduated the year before them. Your parents were truly part of a gifted generation. There’s never been such a huge group of talented shinobi to all come of age at the same time . . . and frankly, there hasn’t been since, until your class graduated.”

They’d sat in silence for a couple of moments, and Sarada had reflected on her parents’ legacy proudly. Both of her parents were great shinobi, and she had the chance to be a great shinobi, too, just like them. She’d have to be, if she was planning to be Hokage someday.

And then Mitsuki had asked, “But isn’t that twelve?”

“Hmm?” Konohamaru-sensei had said absently.

“That’s four three-man squads. Why are they called the Konoha Eleven if there’s twelve of them?”

Boruto had sat up straight. “You’re right. I always assumed they were just subtracting Inojin’s dad, because Dad said he didn’t go to the Academy with them. But he’d be the thirteenth person, not the twelfth.”

“Well, I always assumed . . . .” Sarada had stopped talking, only realizing how ridiculous it sounded when she was getting ready to say it out loud.

“What?” Konohamaru-sensei had asked. His tone was weirdly gentle.

“That it was your Uncle Neji,” she’d finished, looking apologetically at Boruto. “Because . . . .”

Konohamaru-sensei’s face had broke into a surprised smile. “Oh, yeah. People who are killed in action get kicked out of the club. Those are the rules.”

“Well, I couldn’t think of anybody else who had some sort of differentiating factor!”

Next to her, Boruto was had started tapping his fingertips against his thigh, as if he were counting something, his lips moving silently. Then, suddenly, he’d started taking huge bites out of a huge sandwich he had inexplicably pulled out of his bag earlier, looking anywhere except at the people next to him.

“Why are you acting like you have a theory but you don't want to share it?" Mitsuki had asked him. And for once, Sarada had been grateful for Mitsuki’s complete and utter lack of tact, because she’d _also_ wanted to know why Boruto was suddenly being so frigging weird.

Boruto had taken his sweet time to chew and swallow.

“Well,” he’d said finally, “didn’t Sai take over Sasuke’s place on the old Team Seven for a little bit? Maybe they got the Konoha Eleven nickname when he was away.”

“Lord Seventh straight-up left the village for two years to go train with a sex pervert. Maybe they’re not counting _him_.” Sarada’d had no idea what she was getting so defensive about—or why she was so mad at Lord Seventh, who, frankly, she idolized. But it felt like her father's honor had been called into question, somehow, and it suddenly felt imperative to prove Boruto wrong.

“No, Boruto’s right,” Konohamaru said hesitantly. “The whole ‘Konoha Eleven’ thing happened when your dad was on a different mission from everyone else. And I feel like I should point out that Master Jiraya was a great ninja, and a father figure to Big Brother Naruto, but you’re not wrong about the sex pervert part.”

Sarada’s heart had deflated instantly. But if anyone had asked her in that moment what _specifically_ about the answer was so disappointing, she didn’t know if she would have been able to answer.

 _Of course it’s him, s_ aid a voice in the back of her head. _Because your dad is an antisocial asshole who was never around for your entire childhood, and of_ course _he wasn’t even around during_ his own _childhood._

Konohamaru-sensei had wrapped a warm, brotherly arm around her shoulders. “Don’t get too caught up in the nicknames, okay? It doesn’t change any of the things that man said. _All_ of your parents are extremely talented shinobi.” He'd looked at all of them—Mitsuki, too. “And never forget that it’s a privilege to be able to learn from those who came before us. Think about all of the skilled shinobi who are working in our village. It’s a gift to have access to their stories, to be able to learn from their expertise. And in this age of information, too. Think of the incredible tools that you have access to . . . .”

And like the do-gooder and total sucker that she was, she’d found herself so wrapped up in his little pep talk about learning that it took her until they were on the train to realize that he’d changed the subject on them.

While they’d made their way home in the darkness, as Mitsuki and Boruto and Konohamaru-sensei dozed off in the seats near her, Sarada had just stared out the window and played the conversation over and over again in her head, trying to blink back silent tears of frustration and rage.

On one hand, the more she thought about it, the less surprised she was. Her father had been going off alone on secretive missions for her entire life—being the only living person with a certain powerful visual prowess would do that to you—so in some ways, it made sense that he’d been going on them before she was born, too. And she’d known that he’d had a separate team besides Team Seven—with Karin and Jugo and Suigetsu—and that Inojin’s father had taken her father’s place on Team Seven with her mother and Lord Seventh for a little bit. So she didn’t see what reason there was to panic.

Except . . . if there was an innocent explanation for why her father wasn’t part of the so-called the Konoha Eleven, why hadn’t Konohamaru-sensei just s _aid_ that? Why was the truth about her father the very last thing that people wanted to tell her? What did Konohamaru-sensei know about her father that she didn’t?

And for that matter, what the hell did _Boruto_ know about her father that she didn’t?

Sarada tried not to be angry. She loved her father very much, and she understood that he’d had a difficult life. After all, entire clans didn’t just _die_ of their own accord. And she knew that her father had a working relationship with Orochimaru, and she didn’t think that people who had _good_ childhoods had established partnerships with historic Leaf Village criminals. (That Orochimaru was also the parent of one of her best friends was, she thought, a separate issue.)

Sarada could appreciate that her father was _trying._ She knew that he was working very hard to break down walls that he’d been putting up before she was even born. And she thought she’d been _extremely_ patient while she waited for him to be comfortable enough to tell her the truth.

But it turned out maybe her father was _already_ freakin’ comfortable. Maybe he’d decided to open up about it to people who were _important_ enough. And it didn't include her, because _of course_ it didn't. But apparently, it included his beloved pupil Boruto Uzumaki—the prince of the Leaf Village, God’s gift to shinobi, who had always gotten everything she wanted and more without having to work for it.

* * *

Just as she’d finished changing onto her pajamas, there was a knock on her bedroom door.

“Come in!”

The door opened, and her mother poked her head in. “You okay?”

Sarada quickly pulled on a smile. “Of course. Why do you ask?”

“You just seem a little quiet. Are you sure everything went okay on your mission?”

This was why Sarada never worried when her mother took the occasional night off. Her mother’s cheeks were still flushed, but her eyes were perfectly serious and caring, searching to make sure that everything was all right.

Sarada would have appreciated it if she weren’t so annoyed.

“Yeah,” Sarada said simply. “I’m just tired. Long day. Long train ride.”

Her mother shrugged. “I guess that’s true. Dad and I will stop yelling about Jenga so you can get some sleep.” Then her mother crossed her arms. “You positive that you don’t need to debrief about anything?”

Sarada waved her hand. “It really wasn’t anything. It’s just been a long day.”

“Just checking.” Her mother walked across the room, wrapped her arm around Sarada’s shoulders, and kissed her on the forehead. “Get some sleep. Love you, sweetie. Welcome home.”

“Love you, too, Mom.”

When her mother left the room and shut the door behind her, Sarada flopped down on her bed and sighed.

Sometimes Sarada thought that her mother was almost as much of an enigma as her father was. Which was strange, because her mother was as open of a book as her father was closed. While her father had spent her entire childhood skulking around in shadows outside the Leaf Village, her mother had been organizing community fundraisers and teaching classes at the hospital and making sure that Sarada had the happiest childhood that any little girl could ask for.

Not every fourteen-year-old girl could genuinely say that her mother was her best friend. Their relationship was fire-forged, and Sarada knew that she could trust her mother with anything.

Which was why it was _so goddamn weird_ that whatever was going on with her dad, her mother was taking _his_ side.

When she’d been a little girl, she’d been naïve enough not to notice the way her mother didn’t give specific answers about her father. After she’d thrown that rather infamous tantrum back in the Academy and brute-forced her way into her father’s life, things had changed: Yes, she’d developed a relationship with him, and yes, her parents had gotten a little more open with her about some things. But that just made it more obvious when they gave her non-answers or answered with half-truths: _Your father’s parents and brother died when he was a child_ , without saying how. _I was on a different mission when that happened_ , without saying where or when.

On her best and most sympathetic days, Sarada could understand that her parents—her mother in particular—had their reasons. That there was something lurking in the shadows, something that her mother wanted to help her father keep at bay.

But who was her mother trying to protect, Sarada or her father? Or _both?_

And exactly _who—_ or _what_ —was her mother trying to protect them _from_?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to this chapter! It features a lot of Sarada, a lot of exposition, and no Itachi. We're getting there.


	3. All These Things That I've Done

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A conversation with Konohamaru leads Sasuke to realize that he can't put off the this-is-why-our-family-is-dead conversation with Sarada for much longer.

Being an elite shinobi involved a lot more paperwork than Sasuke Uchiha had expected.

Now that he was actually working within the village with some regularity for the first time in his adult life, he’d decided to make himself useful by offering to help Naruto and Shikamaru clear out the piles of forms that were terminally backlogged on Naruto’s desk. What he hadn’t realized when he made that offer, however, was that those assholes would use the opportunity to get their revenge for the decade and a half he’d spent making _them_ fill out _his_ mission paperwork for him while he fucked off abroad. He was going to be entering data at this desk until he died.

Somebody really should have warned him about the paperwork. There should have been a lesson on it at the Academy: _Someday, if you work really hard, you’ll become such a high-ranking ninja that you loop all the way back around to having to sit at a desk indoors all the time!_

It didn’t help that he had the shittiest office in the building, by virtue of being the very last person to be assigned to a desk. (“You shoulda been here when we were giving out office spaces if you felt that strongly about it,” Naruto had said, with that idiotic grin of his, when Sasuke had protested.) It was really more of a closet than an office, and it didn’t even have any windows. If overuse of the Sharingan and Rinnegan didn’t decimate his eyesight, having to fill out all this paperwork and type on this computer in this tiny, dark office probably would.

He barely even understood how to use the computer. He’d had to have Sarada explain to him how to make his email address work.

He had an _email address._

As a kid, he’d never been able to picture what his life would look like when he was an adult. To be fair, this was largely because at the age of seven, he’d resigned himself to the fact that he wasn’t going to make it to adulthood in the first place. Even the briefest snippets of adulthood he could imagine involved him wandering the roads, alone, miserable, with no long-term sustainable plan besides surviving off of pure hatred.

But considering that he’d somehow made it to his thirties in spite of himself, with no expectations or plans for what to do when he got there . . . he had to admit that paperwork was not, in the grand scheme of things, a problem that was worth complaining about.

So far, coming home to the Leaf Village had proven to be worth it. So far, it hadn’t felt like a mistake. And if paperwork was the price he had to pay for his life now—a life where he got work alongside his best friend protecting the world, and then got to come home to the family he never dreamed he’d have again—then so be it. He'd learn to live with it.

As he moved another pile of event permits to the “completed” tray on the corner of his desk, he heard footsteps approaching from the hallway, and he looked up. Konohamaru leaned against the doorway, smiling.

“There’s something deeply unsettling about seeing you behind a desk,” Konohamaru said.

“There’s something deeply unsettling about _being_ behind a desk,” Sasuke muttered.

Konohamaru snorted. “Can I ask you for a favor? I promised Team Seven that I’d do some shuriken drills with them, but I just got called out with Moegi on a mission, and I’ll be gone for the next week. Besides, I figure you’re the guy for that particular lesson, anyway.”

“Sure. I can work with them.”

Sasuke didn’t mind being the substitute teacher for Team Seven. Konohamaru was better at being a _proper_ teacher than he was, but Sasuke figured that he was already training two-thirds of the new Team Seven on the side, and he also felt a weird compulsion to protect Mitsuki, a fellow Orochimaru test subject. It made logical sense for Sasuke to step in when Konohamaru was away.

And if it was going to get him out of this goddamn closet office for a couple of days, he certainly wasn’t going to protest.

“Thanks. I really appreciate it.” Konohamaru crossed his arms. “By the way, Sarada really came in clutch on our mission. Did she tell you?”

“No, we didn’t get the chance to talk about it. She went right to bed last night.”

“Well, she’s really mastering her Sharingan. I mean, she was always talented, but . . . when she puts the Sharingan and her chakra control together, what a powerhouse. But anyway.” Konohamaru knocked his fist against the wall lightly. “Thanks again for your help.”

“Of course.”

Sasuke expected Konohamaru to walk out of his office after that, but he didn’t. He kept standing there, shifting his weight from one leg to the other.

“Listen, can I talk to you about something?” Konohamaru asked.

That was never a promising opening line to a conversation.

“Sure,” Sasuke said, keeping his voice calm. “What’s up?”

It seemed like Konohamaru was trying to think of the best way to start. Finally, he said, “Well. . . I mean, I’m not going to pretend that I understand what you went through as a child. And I’m especially not going to pretend that I know what it’s like to _raise_ a child.”

Sasuke raised his eyebrows. “You don’t have to make the disclaimers. Just tell me what I did wrong.”

Konohamaru rubbed the back of his neck. “Nothing. I just . . . .” He seemed to be screwing up his courage. “Not to talk out of turn, but I think you should consider talking to Sarada about the Uchiha clan. I understand the reasons you wanted to wait, but I think she’s old enough now that she can understand. And . . . I think the window you have to tell her—so that she hears it from _you_ and not somebody else—is going to close very soon.”

Sasuke felt his mouth go dry. “Did somebody say something to her?”

Konohamaru hesitated. “Is there something that Boruto knows that Sarada doesn’t?”

 _Shit._ He should have known that this would come back to bite him in the ass. “He accidentally found out that I deserted the village when I was a genin, but that’s all he knows.”

“That explains it.” Konohamaru shrugged. “To make a long story short, a little bit of Leaf Village history came up in conversation last night. Thankfully Boruto figured out he was in dangerous territory and did his best, because he has a _little_ more self-awareness than Big Brother Naruto—”

Sasuke couldn’t help but snicker.

“—but I think Sarada caught on that Boruto knows something. I think if she finds out about it from him, or feels that you trusted Boruto with this information and not her, then she’s going to have a much harder time accepting it.”

_Shit. Shit, shit, shit._

“I understand,” Sasuke said. “Thank you for telling me. And thank you for looking out for her.”

“Of course. It’s a privilege to work with the new generation. Especially when they’re as talented as Sarada.” He gave a cheeky salute. “Anyway, thanks again for helping me out. I appreciate it.”

When Konohamaru was gone, Sasuke leaned back in his chair and ran his hand over his face.

So _that_ was why Sarada was being weird when she got home from her mission last night.

He’d wondered if she was just in a mood—she’d had a long day, after all—but he’d learned that Sarada didn’t really _get_ in moods. At least not the same way he did. She was more like Sakura that way: She wore her heart on her sleeve, and if there was something wrong, you’d hear it directly from her, either from her mouth or her fist.

On the other hand, Sarada had clearly inherited the Uchiha “fuck all y’all” gene, as evidenced by the fact that she’d snuck out of the village twice so far without permission: one to crash Naruto’s meeting with him, and once to follow Mitsuki.

The thing about taking Boruto on as his pupil was that Sasuke saw _just enough_ of himself in Boruto to know all of the little corrective nudges were necessary to keep Boruto on the straight and narrow: a little cut here, a little stitch there, and he’d be respectable in no time.

But Sasuke saw enough of himself in Sarada to know that she would be absolutely fine and perfectly happy as long as he didn’t fuck up. And if he had one talent, it was fucking things up. If the this-is-why-our-family-is-dead conversation went anything less than perfectly, he didn't know what Sarada would do.

But Konohamaru was right: The only worse option would be to keep putting it off until Sarada learned the truth from someone else. She was getting too old and too wise to the ways of the ninja world. All it would take was one person in Konoha to innocently let something slip—or worse, one cruel word from someone she encountered on a mission, be they a rogue ninja he’d crossed paths with back in the day or a villager who hadn’t quite forgiven him. If she heard any of it out of context, she’d try to put the pieces together, and then there was a very real chance she’d go off the deep end the exact same way that he had. He couldn’t let that happen. In order to understand what had happened and why they had kept it a secret from her, she was going to need to hear the whole truth, all at once, from somebody she trusted. From _him._

The ironic thing about Konohamaru being right was that Konohamaru himself didn’t even _really_ know what he was asking. Konohamaru knew the same story as everyone else in the village who was old enough to remember: that Itachi Uchiha had killed the entire Uchiha clan, and that Sasuke had gone mad with grief and betrayed the Leaf Village. That in and of itself would be a horrific conversation to have with his dutiful rule-follower of a daughter.

To tell Sarada that Itachi had been _forced_ to make an impossible choice and turn on his clan by the highest powers in the Leaf Village—the very same Leaf Village that she adored and aspired to lead one day—would kill her. He believed that it was necessary, and that she was entitled to know the truth, but it would kill her. The bright-eyed young shinobi who went into that conversation would not come out of it the same way, and he wasn’t ready to take that innocence away from her yet.

The worst part of all was that there was only _one_ person he knew of who knew what he was going through, who had been the keeper of the tragedy of the Uchiha clan and been the one forced to pass that knowledge on to someone too young and impressionable to know what to do with it. And Itachi had been dead for almost twenty years now.

Sasuke remembered the day he’d turned twenty-three and realized that he was now older than his older brother ever had been. The wound never seemed to close, no matter how much older he got. He had spent his whole life chasing after Itachi: when he was a little boy trying to get his older brother to notice him, when he was a revenge-crazed child whose entire existence revolved around exterminating his brother, and when he learned of Itachi’s sacrifice and became determined to honor that sacrifice in blood. Even now, he was still chasing after Itachi’s ghost, wondering what he was supposed to do with all of the feelings he had for his older brother. He wondered if he would ever stop wishing that he could just go to his big brother and ask what the hell he was supposed to do.

Thinking about it made Sasuke feel like the walls were closing in on him. He got up and wrapped his cloak around his shoulders.

He had an appointment at the hospital a little later, so he figured he’d just head out for now. He’d get there almost an hour early, but that was better than being in this room any longer. He felt like if didn’t go for a walk, or do _anything else_ besides sit in that tiny dark office and think about his dead brother, he’d explode.

* * *

Since he’d made the decision to stay in the village more often, Sasuke had started seeing a therapist through a counselling program that Sakura and Ino had set up after the war. The program was _technically_ mostly for traumatized children, and was there something a little strange about him—a fully-trained shinobi in his mid-thirties—folding himself into a child-sized bean bag chair in a room with foam puzzle piece floors and bins full of stuffed animals once a week? Sure.

But if they were all being honest with themselves, Sakura had founded the program at least in part to stop the creation of any future Sasuke Uchihas. It seemed to him that the program should be just as good at un-doing the creation of the _original_ Sasuke Uchiha.

Only a few people knew about the therapy thing: Sakura and Sarada, obviously; Tsunade, who’d helped Sakura pick which doctor to send him to, since talking through even the abridged version of his trauma was a nightmare for village intelligence; Kakashi, because Sasuke still felt a weird need to check in with his de facto father figure; and Naruto—not only because, well, he was _Naruto,_ but because as the Hokage, he went out of his way to make sure that as long as Sasuke wasn’t on a mission, his schedule was _always_ clear when it was time to go to his appointment.

So every Thursday afternoon, he reported to the children’s wing of the Leaf Village Hospital for his one-hour meeting with a thoroughly-vetted medical ninja named Miroku. And if Sakura had time afterward, he’d usually stop by her office for a few minutes so she could check in on him.

Since he was there so early today, he figured he’d swing by _before_ his appointment this time. He knocked on her office door and poked his head inside. “Got a couple minutes?”

He loved the way her face lit up every time she looked up from her paperwork and saw him standing in her doorway.

“Of course, dear!” she said. “What are you doing here so early? I thought your appointment wasn’t until two.”

He stepped into her office and shut the door behind him. “It is. I just had an interesting conversation with Konohamaru that I thought we should talk about.” As he grabbed a chair and pulled it over to her desk, he jutted his chin towards the two extra-large iced coffees—one empty, one half-finished—beside her. “Are we regretting Drunk Jenga this morning?”

She scowled. “How are you _not_ hung over?”

“It’s one of my many gifts.” He dropped himself into the chair, smirking.

“Oh! Speaking of gifts . . . .” Sakura grabbed a lunch box from the corner of her desk and started to open it. “My mom had to come in for a check-up, and she brought me a couple slices of cake. She says it’s not that sweet, and she figured you’d like it.”

“That was nice of her.” When he and Sakura had gotten together, he had still been getting used to the idea that she, Naruto, and Kakashi legitimately liked him. That Sakura’s parents might _tolerate_ him after everything he’d done seemed like a fairy tale ending. He did not _ever_ imagine a future where he had a mother-in-law that liked him enough to make him snacks.

They decided to split a slice. Sakura pulled a set of utensils out of her desk drawer, and while they ate the cake—she with the fork, he with the spoon, because she only had one of each utensil—Sasuke told her about his conversation with Konohamaru.

When he was finished, Sakura sat back in her chair, one leg crossed over the other, licking frosting off of the fork. “I’m guessing you’re going to talk this through in therapy, but what are you thinking so far?”

“I think I’m running out of excuses not to have The Talk with Sarada.” There was, however, a question that Sakura would know the answer to better than his therapist. “Do you think she’s ready for it?”

Sakura thought for a moment. “I think it’s going to be a very delicate conversation. But generally, I think if kids are able to verbalize questions, they’re old enough to hear the answers. And she’s been asking for a while. Besides, she’s not that innocent little girl from the Academy anymore. She’s a working genin. She’s seen darkness in the world.” She looked him in the eyes. “Do you think _you’re_ ready for it?”

“I didn’t think I was. But honestly, when Boruto found out even the scrap he knows . . . it was kind of a relief. To be able to talk about it.” He swallowed. “I just . . . don’t want it to change things between her and me.”

“It won’t.”

He jabbed at the cake with his spoon. “How can you say that and be sure?”

“Because she’s our child. And if there’s one thing that both you and I are known for, it’s that we love our people _way_ too hard, in spite of everyone’s best efforts to talk us out of it.” She elbowed him gently. “If anything, I think it will bring the two of you closer. And . . . I’m not saying it’s exactly the same, but . . . isn’t that what you said Itachi said to you? That he wished he’d told you the truth in the first place?”

Sasuke nodded. _If I had been open with you from the start, and looked you straight in the eyes and told you the truth, then I wouldn’t have had to stand before you now as a failure._ That was what Itachi had told him, right before he’d died for the second time. Sasuke would remember those words for as long as he lived.

With Sarada, Sasuke had the chance to give Itachi his do-over. Sasuke could give Sarada the life that he had never had, could help her look the Uchiha legacy in the eye and not make the same mistakes as the people that came before her.

“I’m thinking of asking Naruto to be there,” he said. “Because . . . I remember what it was like for me, to hear the things that Danzo asked in the name of the Leaf Village.” The truth had literally driven Sasuke to madness, and he’d only been a couple of years older than Sarada was now when he’d learned it. “I know how she looks up to Naruto, and I think if he were there . . . I think it would help her understand that things are different now, and Naruto is never going to let things go back to the way they were. And that we can have a complicated relationship with the clan and the village and still want to protect the people that we care about.”

“I think that’s a good idea.”

There was a lump growing in his throat. “I don’t know when's the best time to have the conversation. It has to be sooner rather than later, but I want to think about what to say first. I, um, might need your help figuring it out.”

“Of course.” She put her hand on his knee. “I’m really proud of you, Sasuke.”

As always, there was that part of him that instantly, reflexively denied any praise or affection: _You shouldn’t be proud of me. I am an inherently broken person, and I shouldn’t get gold stars for doing the bare minimum._

But that voice wasn’t the only one anymore. For the first time in his life, he was starting to feel like he had his shit together. And if he’d learned anything from working with Boruto, it was that—in spite of everyone’s expectations, including his own—he could be a good influence in the world. He was starting to have hope that he might be able to change things for Sarada for the better, too.

He put the spoon down to put his hand on top of hers. She intertwined their fingers, and he rubbed the back of her hand with his thumb.

With her other hand, Sakura cut the last little remnant of cake in half.

“I think I should ask my mom for the recipe for this cake,” she said, as she shoved one half in her mouth. “It’s pretty good.”

“I think _I_ should ask your mom for the recipe for this cake.”

Sakura pouted. “That’s not fair. I’m not bad at _baking._ ” Then she grinned. “Just cooking and cleaning and everything else about being a housewife.”

He snorted.

She scooped up the last little bite of cake and held it out on the end of her fork for him. He leaned down and took a bite.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh snap, guess who finally shows up in the Leaf Village next chapter?
> 
> Also, have you guys ever seen Season 2 of Fargo, when at the end (SPOILERS) Mike Milligan is so good at being a hitman in the crime syndicate that he ends up being promoted to a boring middle-management office job? That's what I think of whenever I see my poor original-gen characters stuck doing paperwork as adults in Boruto.


	4. . . . and I'm new in town.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Disguised as a university student, Itachi is forced to the gather intel in the modern Leaf Village and crosses paths with the new Team Seven, who offer to help him with his "research."

After that mysterious woman, Jun, had reanimated him, Itachi had expected to find the Leaf Village in shambles. It was the only reason he could think of that somebody would bother to bring him back to life: so he could either save the village or be a party to its destruction. He had been expecting to find the village razed to the ground, or full of suffering and starving people, or under the control of some kind of dictator—and a part of him honestly wouldn’t have been surprised if that dictator was his little brother.

What Itachi had _not_ been expecting to find was a thriving, populous city, much less one that seemed to be completely at peace.

He still hadn’t figured out how long he’d been dead for, but he could tell it had been a while, because the entire village was unrecognizable to him. Things had been built and torn down and moved around, and nothing was where he remembered it being. And technology seemed to have advanced by leaps and bounds—they hadn’t even had a television in his house growing up, and now there was a giant, flat-screen, electronic billboard in the center of the Leaf Village, bigger than any screen he’d ever seen in his life.

But the most important change was that there were two more Stone Faces on the village wall than there had been the last time he’d seen it. The sixth Hokage had apparently been his old ANBU mentor, Kakashi Hatake. He would’ve been a solid leader after the war: practical, loyal, even-keeled. The village would’ve been safe in his hands.

And the seventh and most recent face added to the wall . . . was Naruto Uzumaki’s. He’d become Hokage, just like he’d promised he would.

When Itachi saw Naruto’s face up there, he stopped dead in his tracks. The sight was such a relief that that Itachi wasn’t convinced that he wasn’t just dreaming it.

The entire ninja world—himself included—had been relying on Naruto to set things right during the Fourth Great Ninja War, and if Naruto had survived, then that meant that peace had been restored. If Naruto had become _Hokage_ , then this as a completely different village than the one that Itachi had left behind all those years ago, the one that Danzo had planned to shape in his own image.

Besides, Itachi had personally entrusted Sasuke’s well-being to Naruto. And if Naruto had survived . . . .

Suddenly, his legs jerked forward, and he found himself once again walking down the elevated walkway connecting the upper levels of the village.

 _All right, I get it,_ he thought, irritated. _No dilly-dallying. I’ll keep moving._

Being reanimated by Jun was a lot like when he’d been reanimated by Kabuto. He had some amount of control over what he said or did unless he was given a specific command, in which case his body was forced to obey. The main difference was that this time around, he hadn’t pre-installed a handy dandy Uchiha Rescuing jutsu into Naruto. He was still trying to figure out a way around that.

He’d tried to brute force his way out of being mind-controlled the night before, when he and Jun were making their way to the Leaf Village. All he’d gotten for his efforts was an Itachi-shaped hole in a cliff outside the Sand Village, a derailed train (since when was there a train connecting the Leaf and the Sand?), and probably a cracked rib or two.

Since that hadn’t worked, he’d decided that his best—and only—strategy for now was to lay low and gather as much intel as he could without provoking Jun into exerting control over him, at least until he healed himself and figured out a better plan.

Thankfully, for now, Jun seemed content to just use him as an avatar of sorts. First, she’d put him in disguise—a red wig, green color contacts, and fake glasses, all of which looked _so strange_ on his clearly-an-Uchiha face—and then she’d sent him into the Leaf Village to hunt. She had refused to tell him _what_ he was looking for, but that was the point. The less information she gave him, the easier he would be to control, because he could not possibly help himself if he didn’t understand what was going on.

Of course, it helped that he was still too weakened after their battle from the night before to get into trouble. And aside from his injuries, he quite literally had no idea how long ago he’d last eaten anything or drunk water—and it turned out he did still need to do both of those things to function, even as a zombie-person. He wasn’t sure if Jun didn’t know that, or if that was another mechanism that she was using to control him. Either way, if he didn’t sit down or eat or drink something soon, she was going to have to reanimate him a third time.

Even as her jutsu forced him to keep walking, he was finding it harder and harder to keep his steps moving in a straight line, or to keep his eyes focused ahead on where he was going.

His eyes suddenly fluttered shut, and for a second, he swayed on his feet, feeling the ground tilt underneath him.

Before he fell, somebody gently took hold of his arm.

“Hey, are you okay? Come here and sit down for a second.” It sounded like a teenage boy’s voice.

Someone gently pressed on his shoulder to make him sit on a bench. He was too tired to resist, and he hunched over and cradled his head in his hands, trying to stop his stomach from lurching.

“Are you all right?” asked a second voice, also probably a teenage boy.

“I’m fine. I’ll be fine.” Itachi was sweating so much. He could feel it dripping down his back, and he brushed the back of his hand across his forehead to wipe away even more.

“Mitsuki, can you run into one of those restaurants and get him a cup of water?” asked the first boy.

“Yeah.”

Itachi opened his eyes and squinted up. All he could see—between his own exhaustion and the sunset glaring directly into his eyes—was a flash of blond hair and two huge, blue eyes.

_Naruto?_

But that didn’t make sense. This boy was even younger than Naruto had been the last time Itachi saw him—and he was _way_ too young to be Naruto now, if Naruto was the Hokage.

Itachi blinked, trying to clear his vision. The boy’s face came into clearer view, and if it wasn’t Naruto, it was someone who looked a _lot_ like him. Like a younger brother, or like—

_Or like a son._

Of course. That meant that he’d been dead for . . . at least thirteen or fourteen years, if he was estimating this boy’s age correctly.

The second boy, who was pale with silvery-blue hair, returned and handed him a cup of ice water.

“Thank you.” Itachi chugged the whole cup. He didn’t mean to, but once the water touched his throat, he found that he couldn’t stop himself from slugging it down.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” the Naruto lookalike asked. “Is there somebody we can call? Or somewhere that we can take you?”

Itachi cleared his throat. “I’ll be okay. Thank you.” He looked up at the boys again. He was already in disguise, and he didn't know what the boys did or didn't know about Itachi Uchiha and the Uchiha Massacre, so he knew better than to give his real name. “I’m Eiji,” he said instead.

The blonde boy nodded. “Boruto Uzumaki. This is my teammate, Mitsuki.”

He had to check, just to make sure. “Uzumaki, as in . . . ?”

Boruto sighed. “Yes, as in the Hokage. He’s my dad.”

Itachi said another little prayer of gratitude. The clear irritation in Boruto’s voice meant that Naruto was still around to get on his son’s nerves, which meant that he was still alive, which meant that Itachi had an ally somewhere in the Leaf Village. As soon as he could figure out how to get Naruto’s attention without attracting Jun’s.

Then again, the apple clearly hadn’t fallen far from the tree, because Boruto was still peering at Itachi, looking absolutely determined to be helpful. “Are you sure there isn’t something we can do?”

Itachi waved his hand. “No. I’m sorry to trouble you. I’m just—”

Suddenly his voice wasn’t his own anymore.

“—I’ve been staying up too late working,” he found himself saying. “I’ve spent the past week travelling to the Leaf Village to do some research for my thesis, but I’m having a hard time tracking down the information I need.”

 _Huh._ Apparently Jun could talk through him. And apparently whatever she needed, she’d decided she could get from these two.

“What are you doing your research on?” Mitsuki asked. “Maybe we can help.”

Jun kept talking through him. “It’s called the Scroll of the Ancient Healer. It’s an old text that’s rumored to have originated in this area, before the villages were established. All of the records of its existence in the Sand Village treat it like a folktale, but apparently there are some Hidden Leaf Village records that talk about it like it really existed. I was hoping I might be able to track down some more information if I came here in person and could look around myself.”

All of this was brand-new information to Itachi. But if Jun was going to start showing her cards, he wasn’t going to complain.

Boruto turned to Mitsuki, frowning. “Does that sound kind of familiar to you?”

“Vaguely.” Mitsuki turned to Itachi and explained, “We were in the Hidden Sand for the past couple weeks on a mission, and we spent some time at the museum.” Suddenly, his eyes lit up, and he turned back to Boruto. “Didn’t Sarada have a whole conversation with Mr. Ryu about a healer?”

Boruto’s face brightened. “You’re right! Because that was when we started talking about the hospital and her mom and the Konoha Eleven thing.”

“I actually saw her while I was getting the cup of water, if we want to go ask her.” Mitsuki walked over to the side of the walkway and pointed over the railing. “See? Talking to Lady Tsunade.”

Itachi looked over the railing, too. He recognized Lady Tsunade _immediately_ —her appearance was, of course, suspiciously unchanged since he’d last seen her. She was standing outside a grocery store talking to a girl with red glasses, who must have been Sarada.

“We don’t have to bother her if she’s busy,” Jun said through Itachi. If he could have, Itachi would've laughed. Clearly, Jun was not keen on attracting the attention of a former Hokage.

Boruto waved his hand dismissively. “Nah, she won’t mind. And we had the day off today, so it’s not like she has anything better to do.” He elbowed Mitsuki. “Go say we need to borrow her.”

“Why me?” Mitsuki asked.

“Because Sarada and Grandma Tsunade think I’m annoying, but they think you’re cute, so they won’t be mad at you for interrupting them.”

Mitsuki shrugged and jumped over the railing.

“Say it’s an emergency!” Boruto called after him. “But not the kind of emergency we need to tell my dad or Konohamaru-sensei about! A normal, fun emergency, like normal kids have!”

Itachi watched as Mitsuki landed gracefully on the lower level and headed over to the market.

“Sarada’s the third member of our squad,” Boruto explained, leaning on the railing beside him. “And she’s the book smarts of our operation, which is why I think it’s worth picking her brain.”

Itachi watched as Mitsuki approached Tsunade and Sarada. They both turned to face Mitsuki, and Sarada turned so her back was facing Itachi.

When he saw her shirt, his heart fell out of his body.

“That’s the Uchiha crest,” he said, before he could stop himself.

“Yeah!” Boruto said. “Sarada's the heir of the small, but mighty, Uchiha clan."

Itachi’s heart was racing. “So her father is—”

“Sasuke Uchiha.” Boruto grinned. “My mentor.”

 _“_ Your _mentor?”_ There was not a word that Itachi would have been more surprised to hear used to describe his brother.

Boruto looked over at the Great Stone Faces. “Sarada wants to be the Hokage someday, like my old man. Which is fine, because she’ll be good at it. But there’s a whole lot of world to see and a whole lot of people who need protection, so I don’t plan on sitting behind a desk for the rest of my life. I plan on getting out there and doing the heavy lifting myself. The way Sasuke does for the village now.”

Itachi’s heart was racing. _This is impossible._

What Boruto was saying meant that Sasuke had survived the war. That he had somehow redeemed himself—enough to be the personal mentor of the Hokage’s son, and enough that his daughter could openly display their family crest on her back.

That he’d had a _child._ That the Uchiha clan had lived on, or started over, or . . . . Regardless of how the clan had transformed, Sasuke wasn’t alone anymore. He had a family again. And his daughter was, evidently, a bright, ambitious ninja with big dreams of leading the Leaf Village—well-adjusted, not broken or scared or bitter or anything.

Sasuke and his family had turned out all right, after all. In spite of everything that Itachi had done to ensure the contrary.

Before Itachi could ask any more, Mitsuki and Sarada landed in front of them. Sarada was holding some grocery bags in one hand, and she put the other hand on her hip.

“I have been told that there’s an emergency,” she said to Boruto matter-of-factly, “but not the kind of emergency we need to tell Lord Seventh or Konohamaru-sensei about. A normal, fun emergency, like normal kids have.”

Itachi liked her immediately. She looked _a lot_ like his mother. But that flat, annoyed way of talking was all Sasuke.

Boruto turned on Mitsuki. “You weren’t supposed to repeat it word-for- . . . .” He scowled. “Never mind.”

Sarada, meanwhile, looked at Itachi. “Who’s our new friend?”

It did not escape Itachi’s attention that he was doing something he’d never, in a million years, imagined he’d do again: talking to a family member. “I’m Eiji,” he said, when he found his voice again. “It’s nice to meet you, Sarada.”

“Eiji says he’s doing research on the Scroll of the Ancient Healer,” Boruto explained. “Isn’t that what you were talking to Mr. Ryu about when we were in the Sand the other day?”

“Oh, yeah! I totally forgot about that! I was going to ask my mom about it. What are you doing your research on?”

Jun started talking through Itachi again. “I’m just trying to track down any primary sources that mention it. I’ve heard that there are some that treat it like a real, historical artifact, and that discuss where it was supposed to have been written.”

Sarada thought for a moment. “Mr. Ryu gave me a book about the artifacts in the museum, and I’m pretty sure it talked about the Scroll of the Ancient Healer.” She held up her grocery bags. “I have to get back home and put the ice cream in the freezer before it melts, so if you guys want to come with me, I could just look it up for you right now. But we have to be quick, because my mom doesn’t let me have boys over when I’m home alone.”

"Fine," Boruto said. "If we get in and get out, then your parents won’t be home to _know_ that you had us over, and nobody will get in trouble. Besides, Eiji isn’t feeling super hot, so he could use a place to sit down and eat. And how mad will your mom _actually_ get about us helping someone?”

Sarada looked up at Itachi, concerned. “Wait, are you really sick? Is there anything I can do?”

It had been so long since _anyone_ —but _especially_ a family member—had fussed over him about him being sick.

“Oh, no, I’m fine!” Itachi held his hands up and tried to smile. “Just haven’t been sleeping well, is all. Don’t worry about me.”

“Well, I can fix you up some food or coffee at something at home if you want. Come on.” She jerked her head in what Itachi presumed was the direction of “home,” although it wasn’t in the direction of the Uchiha district.

And before Itachi could think twice about it, his legs were being forced to jerk forward, following after her, Boruto, and Mitsuki.

“Uh, thanks,” Itachi said, mostly to be polite. “I appreciate the help.”

On the inside, however, he was cursing himself.

He had to admit that he was curious. Of _course_ he wanted to see how his brother had turned out, how he and his family lived. Of course he wanted to talk to Sarada, who reminded him _so much_ of Sasuke and of their mother.

But every time he’d shown up in Sasuke’s life, it had only brought chaos and destruction. It wouldn’t be any different now. He hated himself for even _wanting_ to see what Sasuke’s life looked like now, for feeling like he had any right at all to ask what had become of the clan he’d single-handedly decimated.

More importantly, he didn’t like that Jun hadn’t tried to stop him from meeting his niece—and was now, in fact, directing him to follow her. It could just mean that Jun didn’t care that Itachi was talking to them—that she didn’t see three genin as a threat. But given who two of the genin in question were, he thought it was more likely that Jun was trying to gather intel off of them. And as long as she could use Itachi as a tool—as long as she could see through his eyes—then there was nothing he could do to protect them.

* * *

There was something strange to Itachi about the fact that his family—the illustrious Uchiha clan—lived an apartment building downtown. It was a _really_ nice apartment, but it certainly wasn’t like the house that he and Sasuke had grown up in. It wasn’t the same as having the entire Uchiha district, full of aunts and uncles and cousins and shops and activity. It had been wrong for the village to push the Uchiha clan to the outskirts, but that didn’t mean that it wasn’t fun sometimes, living in his family’s own little world.

But then again, Itachi knew better than anyone the reason why Sasuke had chosen to live this way. The reason why Sasuke would probably never set foot in the Uchiha District again, if it even still existed.

“Are you sure it’s okay for us to be here? Are we going to get you in trouble?” Itachi asked her. He, Boruto, and Mitsuki were following her down the hall, into a connected kitchen and dining room.

Sarada waved her hand. “It’s fine. I ran into Lady Tsunade, and she told me that something happened with a surgery and my mom’s going to get stuck at work late.”

“What about your father?”

“He’s probably at the Hokage’s office with _my_ dad,” Boruto replied.

Sarada tapped the tip of her nose. “Exactly. So neither of them will be home until much later tonight, so we should be fine.” The phone on the end table caught her attention. “Speaking of which, I bet that voicemail is from my mom.” She handed the grocery bag to Boruto. “Can you put these away for me, please? And get some water for Eiji?”

Boruto took the bag obediently, but got distracted in the kitchen. “Did you bake cookies? Can I have one?”

“I did, and you can, but they’re oatmeal raisin and you’re not going to like them.”

Boruto wrinkled his nose as he put the bag in the freezer. “You and your oatmeal raisin cookies. If you’re going to waste a perfectly good day off by baking, you should at _least_ make a good kind of cookie.”

“Nobody said you _had_ to eat them. Besides, your mom will be mad if you spoil your appetite for dinner.”

“I always have an appetite for snacks. Particularly snacks that are unrelated to ramen.”

“I still don’t believe that the strongest living ninja eats only cup ramen. He’d die from sodium poisoning.”

“One would think, and yet somehow, he persists.”

Sarada scoffed and rolled her eyes, and then she turned her back on them and picked up the phone.

Watching them snipe back and forth filled Itachi with a sense of something that felt like homesickness. He’d never had a friendship that was this easy. Even with Shisui, everything had always been so serious. There had always been a crisis to deal with. It had always felt like the world was caving in on them.

This is what it could have been like, if things had been different. He could have been the aloof older brother, hanging out in the kitchen with his little brother and his friends, watching Sasuke and Naruto bicker after a mission. If they’d had a chance to be a normal pair of brothers, it probably would have felt something like this.

His eyes caught some picture frames that were sitting on a table across the room. There was a framed photo of Team 7: Sasuke, Naruto, and Kakashi, of course, along with Sakura. Itachi knew that Sakura had been the disciple of the Fifth Hokage, but he knew her _primarily_ as the little pink-haired girl who had a crush on his brother when they were children at the Academy. He smirked when he saw the next picture, of a grown-up Sakura—now with the Strength of a Hundred seal on her forehead, proving her link to Tsunade—posing in a yukata with a younger version of Sarada. _He always said that annoying little girl kept telling him that they were going to get married,_ he thought.

There was another picture that looked newer than all the others. In it, Sarada, a smidge younger than she was now, was standing between both of her parents. Sasuke was _smiling_ —a real smile, not just a taking-a-picture smile. Itachi couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Sasuke legitimately smile.

“Are you okay, Eiji?” Suddenly Sarada was at his elbow.

“Yes,” Itachi said quickly. “Uh, sorry. I . . . lost my family at a young age, so I got a little distracted by your pictures. I haven’t seen pictures of my family all together in a while.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

His eyes moved toward the wall, where there was a large, framed picture of the Uchiha crest.

 _Don’t bring it up,_ he told himself sternly. _When you died, you took the secrets with you. She probably doesn’t know anything about what happened, and if you say anything, you’ll ruin everything—_

“You know, I’ve always been curious about the Uchiha clan,” he said, before he could stop himself. “I’ve heard that they were powerful, but I’ve heard they had their fair share of troubles, too.”

Sarada didn’t meet his eyes. “I’ve heard that the Uchiha clan was wiped out 'due to grave misfortune.'”

“Are you quoting something?” Mitsuki asked.

Her voice was quiet. “A book in the library. I looked the clan up once, just out of curiosity.” Suddenly, she blinked. “Oh, shoot! Speaking of looking things up . . . .”

She left the room and wandered down the hallway, presumably to go get her book.

“Hey, Eiji, do you want a cookie?” Boruto asked suddenly.

Itachi turned around. Boruto was taking a seat at the dining room table, carrying a plate of cookies in one hand and a massive glass of water in the other.

“Oh. Thank you.”

He took a seat next to Boruto and across from Mitsuki, and he was slightly ashamed at how quickly he wolfed down his first cookie and reached for a second. He wasn’t big on oatmeal raisin cookies normally, either, but at this point, he would eat _anything._

And while he ate, he made a quick mental note to himself about what had happened when he’d brought up the Uchiha clan: Sarada had gotten quiet, and Boruto had seemed very quick to help her change the subject. _So they know that something happened. But they might not know what._ Maybe Jun hadn't been lying when she'd revived him. Naruto had honored his wishes by keeping the truth of the Uchiha Massacre a secret, but he'd refused to blame Itachi for it, either. Instead, the village had chosen to blame no one.

Boruto pulled a foil packet out of his pocket. “Do you play X Cards, Eiji?”

“No. What are X Cards?”

“It’s this awesome game. All of these cards have famous modern-day shinobi on them, and you use them to battle each other. And ya bois got paid for their most recent mission this morning, which means it’s time to add to my collection.” Boruto tore the packet open.

“He wants a specific rare card, but he’s going to get one of his father,” Mitsuki said. “He always does.”

“Not this time,” Boruto said confidently, fanning the cards out on the table in front of him. “This time, things are going to be different, and—" He paused, looked down at his cards, and let his head fall on the table. “ _Damnit._ ”

Itachi could see a familiar blonde face on a shiny card.

“Can I see it?” he asked.

Boruto slid it over to him. “You can keep it if you want,” he said glumly. “I literally have ten of them.”

“We think it’s a curse,” Mitsuki added cheerfully.

Sarada walked back into the room, holding her book. “Are you _still_ wasting your mission money on those stupid cards? You know that you can just _see_ these people walking down the street every day, right?”

Itachi snickered. “She might have a point,” he said.

Sarada beamed at him. " _Thank you. Finally_ someone agrees with me!"

“It’s fun to play!” Boruto said defensively. “Besides, I can’t stop buying packs until I get the rare one I want.”

“If you want one of my dad,” Sarada said impatiently, “you can just have one of mine.”

Boruto’s cheeks turned pink. “I don’t want one of yours. It’s a pride thing. I have to earn it.” After a second, his brow furrowed. “Wait. How the hell do you have more than one of one of the rarest cards in a game you don’t even _play_?”

Sarada shrugged. “Sometimes the adults buy packs looking for cards of themselves, and if they get one of my dad instead, they give it to me. I have, like, six of my mom, too.” She pulled the bookmark out of the book she’d brought with her—it was, in fact, a card with Sasuke’s face on it.

“Can I see it?” Itachi asked.

“Sure. You can keep it if you want, if Boruto doesn’t want it. I have three.” Sarada sat in the seat next to Mitsuki and slid the card across the table to Itachi.

Itachi peered down at the two cards. Underneath the pictures, the cards listed Naruto and Sasuke’s abilities—which he assumed were real, even though he didn’t recognize all of them—and some stats, which he assumed were made up for the game. He was not completely confident that he could gather enough intel via a children’s playing card game to save himself, but at this point, he’d take any help he could get.

“So we’re looking for information on the Scroll of the Ancient Healer?” Sarada asked. She flipped to the back of the book to check the index.

“Oh. Yeah.” Itachi had already completely forgotten that that was why he'd come here in the first place.

But when he looked across the table and looked at his brother’s daughter, he found himself getting distracted again. He was still surprised at how much he genuinely liked her right off the bat. She was quick-witted, snarky, funny, caring—who Sasuke could have been, if Sasuke’d had the chance to be normal. Or Shisui. She reminded him of Shisui, too: so kind, so even-keeled, so logical.

It wasn’t exactly the same thing, but looking at her reminded him of all those years ago, when he saw his mother holding Sasuke in the hospital for the first time. He’d known instantly that a part of his soul lived in somebody else’s body now, and that he would do anything to protect Sasuke for as long as he lived. He felt the same way about Sarada now.

Which was why he felt a sense of revulsion that Jun was here, talking to his family. Setting him up to ruin the peace they’d all finally built for themselves without him.

“What does the book say about the scroll?” Jun asked through him.

“Not as much as I thought. The index only has a couple of pages listed.” Sarada flipped ahead, and then she started to read out loud. “‘The Scroll of the Ancient Healer is an artifact that is referenced in a myth that pre-dates the founding of the Great Villages. The Scroll was alleged to have contained a jutsu that allowed the user to heal any wounds in exchange for a blood sacrifice.’” She slid the book over to him. “It doesn't tell me anything Mr. Ryu didn't already tell me, and I'm sure you already know more than me if you're doing your university thesis on it. But it does have a list of a couple of other texts that mention it."

Jun forced Itachi’s hands to reach out for the book. _Shit._ Itachi tried to keep his eyes locked onto Sarada—away from the text of the book, to prevent Jun from being able to see it. After a brief struggle, she forced his neck to bend, forcing him to read the pages.

Oblivious to the struggle, Sarada sat back in her chair, thinking. “I’ll ask my mom,” she said finally. “If this is a real thing, it _must_ have come up in her training.”

“I could ask my parent, too,” Mitsuki offered. “This seems like the kind of thing my parent would know about.”

“That’s okay,” Jun said through Itachi. “You’ve already been so helpful. I wouldn’t want to cause any more trouble.”

Itachi made a note of that, too. He didn’t know who Mitsuki’s parent was, but it was pretty obvious that Jun was trying not to attract the attention of anyone too high up within the village ranks, if she didn't want to attract Sakura's attention.

Sarada started to answer, and then suddenly held up her hand to silence the others. Itachi heard the front door of the apartment slide open, and Sarada's face fell.

“Crap, my mom’s back,” Sarada whispered.

“I’m home,” called a flat—and distinctly male—voice.

Itachi’s heart dropped.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, this took a lot longer to write and post than I thought it would.
> 
> Also his name is Eiji because ya girl also just watched Banana Fish for the first time.
> 
> Anyway, thanks for reading! You all are stars!


	5. I just want you to know who I am

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sarada contemplates the motives of "Eiji," the mysterious college student, and has a talk with Sasuke about having a bigger talk.

At the sound of her father’s voice, Sarada felt her stomach drop.

“Crap,” she whispered. “He’s _never_ home this early.”

And then, because she could sense it coming, she leaned across the table and clapped her hand over Boruto’s mouth—just as he was getting ready to shout a greeting to his teacher.

“You’re not supposed to be here, remember?” she hissed at him.

Truthfully, though, it wasn’t Boruto or Mitsuki she was worried about. She wasn’t _technically_ allowed to have them over when she was home alone, but she couldn’t really see herself getting in _that_ much trouble for breaking the No Boys rule if it was just Team Seven.

The real problem was Eiji. She wasn’t sure how she was going to explain the presence of a strange man in her apartment, even if she did have Boruto and Mitsuki with her. After all, this went _way_ past a violation of the No Boys rule. This was a violation of the Do Not Let Your Guard Down Around Strangers So They Don’t Cut Out Your Sharingan Eyeballs rule.

She looked across the table at Eiji, who, for some reason, seemed especially taken aback at the sound of her father’s voice. _Well, it seems like he knows a lot about the Uchiha clan,_ she thought. _Maybe he’s intimidated by my dad, the way a lot of people are._

Eiji locked eyes with her again. She didn’t necessarily believe that this quiet, friendly college student was secretly plotting to steal her eyeballs, but she didn’t want the lecture from her parents about it either way.

“Sarada?” her father called.

Sarada pulled her hand away from Boruto’s mouth. “Stay here for a sec,” she whispered to the group, and then she headed out into the hallway.

Her father hadn’t moved from the front doorway. His cloak and sandals were still on.

“Is everything okay?” he asked her.

“Yeah. What about you?” Sarada asked. “You’re never home this early. Is something wrong?”

After a second, her father bent over to start taking off his sandals. “I got cut loose early tonight. Apparently something strange happened on Team Ten’s mission, so Naruto and Shikamaru went to go check it out.”

“Is Chocho okay?”

“She’s fine. It sounds less like their lives were in danger and more like they saw something weird that they wanted Naruto to know about.”

Sarada raised her eyebrows. “In that case, should we be insulted that Lord Seventh and Mr. Nara didn’t invite you to check it out with them?”

Her father snorted. “Apparently if it doesn’t involve interdimensional travel or organized crime, it’s below my pay grade.” He slipped off his sandals and straightened up. “Is Sakura home?”

“No. She got stuck at the hospital.”

Her father paused. “Is there somebody else here?”

Sarada felt herself starting to sweat. “Well—"

Boruto suddenly stormed down the hallway, dragging Mitsuki after him by the wrist. “Hey, Sasuke! How’s it going?”

Sarada felt her shoulders stiffen with irritation. _Morons,_ she thought _._

“Hi, boys,” her dad said. “Shouldn’t you be at home eating dinner?”

“We’re heading out now! We’ll see you tomorrow, Sarada. And Sasuke, let me know when you can train with me! I’m around literally whenever!”

 _Are they just leaving Eiji alone in there?_ she thought. “Wait, what about—”

“The issue has vanished into thin air,” Boruto interrupted, “and we will need to deal with it at another time.”

 _What the hell does that mean?_ Sarada made a face at him, trying to ask silently. But Boruto just waved his hand impatiently and pulled Mitsuki out the door with him.

“What issue?” her father asked, as the door slid shut behind them.

“Uh, something about the mission yesterday. We were just talking it over,” Sarada lied. _What the hell is going on? Where did Eiji go?_

“As long as everything’s okay.” Her father glanced back towards the door. “Are you allowed to have boys over when you’re home alone?”

 _Oh. Maybe he doesn’t know about the rule?_ Her mom and dad had not yet nailed down some of the finer points of running a two-parent household, such as telling each other what the rules were. Sarada wasn’t above using that to her advantage, or above playing games with semantics. “Dad, that’s gross. They’re my teammates,” she said instead.

“Fair enough.” Her dad shrugged. “Have you eaten yet? Want to go to Ichiraku?”

Sarada was surprised. If anything, her father usually preferred to call for takeout and eat at home, rather than being out in the busting center of the village. “Sure! That would be great. Just . . . let me grab something out of the dining room really quickly, okay?”

She headed back into the dining room. Sure enough, Eiji was gone.

But not a single thing in the dining room was out of place.

In disbelief, she even looked under the table, in the kitchen, and behind the curtains, and she still didn’t find him. It was like he’d vanished into thin air, just like Boruto said.

 _Maybe I_ should’ve _been suspicious of Eiji_.

Her father walked into the dining room. “Are you sure everything’s okay?”

Sarada whirled around. Eiji was going to have to be a problem for a future time. “Yeah, sorry. Let’s go!”

* * *

When they got to Ichiraku, Sarada and her father set up with their food in a booth by the front windows.

“Mom used to take me here a lot when I was little,” Sarada said. “She said you guys used to come here after missions.”

Sasuke nodded. “Kakashi used to take us here all the time when we were genin.”

This was the first chance she’d had to talk to her father since she’d gotten back from her mission the night before. She wasn’t mad at him anymore, or at least not in the way that she had been. She’d spent her day off baking cookies and going grocery shopping to blow off some steam, which had kind of worked. Or at the very least, it had kept her distracted.

But . . . she was still a _little_ upset.

Especially after Eiji had started talking about the clan. _“I’ve heard that they were powerful, but I’ve heard they had their fair share of troubles, too.”_

If the Uchiha clan had been as mighty as everyone said they were, then she supposed that they _would_ have a reputation, maybe even one that people outside of the village would know about. But still. There was something about the _way_ he’d said it, like he’d known what those “troubles” were. How did even random college students off the street know more about her family than she did?

_Dad’s here now. Just ask him._

But she couldn’t get herself to say anything. The truth was that even now, she so rarely got to spend a night off with her father like this. She was scared that if she pushed him on it before he was ready, he would try to avoid being put in the same situation in the future. She would rather have her father incompletely than not have him at all.

But suddenly, her father cleared his throat. “So I ran into Konohamaru at the Hokage’s office today. The good news is that you and the boys are doing shuriken training with me tomorrow.”

Sarada frowned. “Did Konohamaru-sensei get sent out on another mission?”

“Yeah. Apparently the Hidden Sand isn’t convinced that the train derailing last night was an accident, so Naruto’s sending Konohamaru over to help with the investigation.” Her father took a sip of his drink. “Anyway, Konohamaru told me that you did a great job on your mission, and he’s really impressed with you.”

“That was nice of him to say.”

There was another long moment of silence.

“Did . . . anything happen on your mission?” her father asked. “Anything that you want to talk about?”

_Oh, my God. Konohamaru-sensei tattled about me getting upset last night._

Her immediate reaction was annoyance and embarrassment. She wasn’t a little kid at the Academy—she was a working genin. She didn’t need Konohamaru-sensei to go behind her back and report to her parents about every little thing that went wrong. 

But then . . . she realized that if Konohamaru-sensei _had_ tattled, that meant that there was something to tattle _about._ She hadn’t been overreacting last night. If Konohamaru-sensei had been worried enough about their conversation to report back to her father about it, then that meant that she’d come _very_ close to finding out something she shouldn’t have.

“Did Konohamaru-sensei tell you that something happened?” Sarada asked carefully, trying to mine for information.

Instead, her father just smirked. “I also know how to answer questions with questions to avoid talking about things.”

Sarada watched her father for a second, looking for any sign that she shouldn’t broach the topic. Her father stared back at her.

“Permission to speak freely?” Sarada asked.

Her father nodded.

“There was a nice little old man who had a lot of nice things to say about the Konoha Eleven during the war,” Sarada said. “Which got us thinking that that’s a very odd nickname for a group of twelve childhood friends.”

A flicker of guilt passed over her father’s face. “Ah.”

“And Boruto seemed to know pretty quickly that you were the twelfth person,” she added. “As long as we’re speaking freely.”

To her surprise, her father rolled his eyes. “That’s because Boruto inherited his father’s need to insert his little whiskers into other people’s personal problems, where they don’t belong.” He stirred his ramen distractedly. “What was Bortuo’s theory?”

“That you were on a different mission. I know there was a period where Inojin’s dad worked with Mom and Lord Seventh while you worked with Karin and the others. Konohamaru-sensei said that it all happened back then.”

“And you don’t believe him?”

Sarada poked at her ramen. “I think there’s a lot that I don’t know about what you were like when you were my age. And whenever it comes up, other people get weird about it, which makes me think that there’s something specific that nobody wants to tell me. And the fact that you and Konohamaru-sensei were talking about it behind my back seems like it confirms that.”

“That there’s something specific nobody’s telling you?”

Sarada nodded. “But that somebody _did_ tell Boruto, apparently." 

Her father seemed hesitant. “He found out a small piece out-of-context. By accident. Nobody told him anything.”

“Really?”

“Of course not.” Her father looked at her. “I wouldn’t have told him anything before I told you.”

Sarada shrugged. “I mean, he’s your student.” _And I’m just your daughter._

“Sarada.” Her father seemed to be struggling to figure out what to say. Finally, he said, “What if the reason nobody’s told you is because no matter how bad you think it is, it’s worse? What if it’s going to change everything? Would you still want someone to tell you? Even if they thought you’d be happier not knowing?” 

“Yes.”

She didn’t hesitate. She felt a lump in her throat—which made her feel stupid, because she didn’t want to cry in the middle of a ramen restaurant, but here they were. “It’s scarier the way that it is now,” she added, “knowing that there’s this big, horrible thing that everybody knows except for me. Because then I have to fill in the blanks, and whatever I think of is so much scarier than whatever the truth could possibly be.”

Her father was watching her, his face soft.

“I know that whatever it is, it explains what happened to the rest of our family,” she said. “And it explains why you . . . . It explains why things are the way they are.”

 _It explains why you weren’t around_ was what she wanted to say, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. But she could tell that her father knew, because his shoulders slumped.

“There’s a part of me that’s never going to be happy until I know,” she said. “And . . . it happened to my family. And it happened to you, and _you’re_ my family. So it matters to me, and I want to know.”

Her father stared at her seriously for a few long moments. “Okay,” he said.

Sarada blinked. “‘Okay?’”

“You’re right. I’d already been thinking about it, but . . . I wasn’t sure if you were ready. But you’re right. Not having the information and having to fumble around in the dark is worse.”

She hadn’t thought it would be this easy. “You’re really gonna tell me? Right now?”

His face broke into a small, sad smile. “No, not right now. It’s not a restaurant conversation.” He reached across the table and poked her in the forehead. “Give me some time to think about what I’m going to say, okay? I want to make sure that I do this right.”

The forehead jab made her cheeks turn pink, as always. She made a face at him. “Fine. Jerk.”

Her father snorted.

“You promise it’ll be soon?” she asked earnestly.

“I promise. Just have to talk to some people first.” He glanced across the restaurant. “Speaking of whom . . . .”

Sarada’s brain suddenly picked up on a familiar voice across the restaurant.

“ . . . thanks so much, Ayame. I really appreciate it.”

“Of course! But before you go, you should go sit down and take a break. Your husband and your daughter are in one of the booths up front there.”

Sarada leaned out of the booth. “Mom?”

Her mother was standing at the counter, holding a paper take-out bag. She turned and looked over, surprised. “Oh, hey, guys!”

She walked over to them. Her father slid over, and her mother slid into the seat next to him.

“What are you guys doing here?” her mother asked.

“I got home earlier than expected,” her father said, “and Sarada was debriefing with the boys about their mission—”

 _Crap._ Well, there was her cover blown.

“—so when the boys left, we decided to go get some dinner.”

“What about you? Are you done at the hospital?” Sarada asked. Partially because she genuinely wanted to know, and partially to deflect.

Her mother sighed. “No, I’m gonna be stuck for a little while longer, so I’m on a dinner break.”

“The surgery isn’t over yet?” Sarada asked.

“No, it is. I was about to clock out when Naruto and Shikamaru showed up.”

Her father’s brow furrowed. “What happened? Naruto assumed it wasn’t going to be a big deal and cut me loose.”

Her mother fussed with her hair for a couple of seconds before she answered, which Sarada knew meant that it wasn’t going to be a Fun, Gross Hospital Story. It was going to be a Depressing Hospital Story.

“Team Ten found a body on their way back to the village,” her mother said. “A teenage girl in those caves in the woods. Which . . . happens. So, while it’s upsetting, that’s not the weird part.”

“What’s the weird part?” Sarada asked.

Her mother paused again. “She . . . didn’t die of the things you might expect a teenage girl you found in the middle of nowhere to die of. She wasn’t injured or attacked. I don’t think it was drugs. It doesn’t look like suicide.”

“So there was nothing wrong with her?”

“No, there was. That’s the thing: She was _incredibly_ sick.”

Sarada frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I did a scan of her organs,” her mother said, “and I think she had been sick for a very long time and died because of it. Her organs were barely healthy enough to function. But if she had been _that_ sick, then _how_ did she end up in the caves halfway between two villages? She would have been barely healthy enough to get out of bed.”

“So, what, she died of this illness and somebody dumped her body in the woods?” her father asked.

Her mother put her chin in her hands. “I don’t know. She was wearing a really nice dress, and other than the fact that she was very sick, she seemed . . . well taken care of. Not like someone who was neglected, who would just be left somewhere like that. It doesn’t make sense.” She sighed. “Anyway. We called in the Leaf Police Force to see if they have any missing persons cases, but they found her halfway between us and the Sand, so Naruto’s trying to get in touch with Gaara, too. I just volunteered to grab dinner so I could take a break and get some air.” She pointed her chin at the take-out bag. “And you can guess who offered to keep me company and what he wanted me to buy him for dinner in exchange.”

“Well, you’ve already had a long day. Don’t overdo it, okay?" her father said gently. "It’s not going to get solved tonight.”

“I know,” her mother said. “But . . . there’s something about this all that just isn’t sitting right with me. And I don’t feel comfortable letting this poor girl suffer without a name. I need to know that someone's looking after her."

There was a moment of heavy silence, and then her mother pulled on a smile.

“Anyway,” she said to her husband in a much lighter tone of voice, “for the record, Sarada’s not allowed to have boys over when she’s home alone, even if it’s Team Seven.” She reached across the table and gently bumped her knuckles against Sarada’s forehead. “Which our little angel knows perfectly well.”

Her father turned to Sarada, his eyebrows raised. “ _Really._ That’s interesting, because I asked her, and she told me she was.”

Her mother let out a dramatic gasp, and her eyes went wide—a mix of surprise and mirth at her goody-two-shoes daughter’s misbehavior. “You _lied_?”

“I mean, _did_ I? Or did I say, ‘That’s gross, Dad, they’re my teammates,’ and not answer the question?”

Her dad thought about it. “That was sneaky. Good job. Don’t do it again.”

Sarada giggled. “Besides, I don’t see how it’s any different from when we go on missions together, or when we’re hanging out at Mitsuki’s—” She quickly realized her mistake and stopped talking, but her mother raised her eyebrows.

“So how often are you three hanging out at Mitsuki’s? Your father and I will call his parent and tattle on you.”

“Do we have to?” her father said glumly.

Her mom grinned. “Fine. We don’t have to.” She picked up the takeout bag. “I’m gonna head out, kids. Don’t wait up for me, all right? We might do a full autopsy tonight, so I’m probably going to be a while.”

She squeezed her husband’s shoulder and got to her feet.

“Even if it's Team Seven?” her father asked suddenly.

Her mother stared at him. “You remember the part where we were on the original Team Seven together, and then you got me pregnant and we had an entire baby in the middle of a mission, right?”

Her father frowned and nodded. “Okay. Valid point.”

“No, it’s _not_ a valid point,” Sarada insisted, feeling her face turn red. “First of all, _gross_. Second of all, you guys were already adults _and_ married when you had me, so it’s not the same thing. Third of all . . . it’s Mitsuki and friggin’ _Boruto_. That’s _disgusting._ ”

Her mother laughed again. “Okay, okay. Sure.” Then she grabbed Sarada’s whole face in both hands and gave her a big, deliberately embarrassing kiss on the forehead. “Good night, my darling! Get home safe! Go to bed early!”

“Oh, my _God_ , Mom,” Sarada grumbled, unable to stop herself from smiling.

* * *

Itachi sat on a roof across the street, watching through the ramen shop window, tears running down his face.

Sasuke looked like their father. He was almost as old as their father had been when he’d died. _When I killed him and Mother._

When Sasuke had shown up at the apartment, Jun had forced Itachi to bail, and he’d gone out the window the instant that all three of the kids took their eyes off him. But Jun didn’t stop Itachi when he waited outside the apartment, or when he followed Sasuke and Sarada as they walked down the street to the ramen shop, keeping his distance up on the rooftops.

Unable to turn off the tactical side of his brain, he’d noticed that Sasuke always made sure that Sarada was standing on his right side, and that he only ever used his right hand to gesture or open doors—which was weird not only because nobody relied _that_ heavily on their dominant hand, but also because wasn’t his little brother left-handed?

He couldn’t figure it out until Sasuke took off that cloak in the restaurant, and Itachi saw that left sleeve, empty below the elbow.

_What the fuck happened during the war?_

He watched as Sasuke and his daughter talked and ate dinner. As Sasuke reached across the table to give his daughter that two-finger poke to the forehead, the one Itachi had always given to Sasuke, now Sasuke’s own gesture of affection. As Sakura sat down with them, the three of them looking like a happy, normal family on a happy, normal night.

Itachi had been about Sarada’s age the last time he’d seen his parents alive. He couldn’t even remember if he’d ever sat a table with them like that, eating a normal dinner. Every memory he’d had of his parents had been overwritten by the final one, the one where they were kneeling with their backs to him, calm and cool as stone in the face of death.

_Take care of Sasuke._

Without meaning to, he found himself mentally swapping out the picture—putting Sarada in his place, standing over Sasuke’s and Sakura’s dead, bloodied corpses.

But that would never happen in this world. Not with Naruto as the Hokage, and not with Sasuke there to protect his daughter.

Somehow, improbably, everything had worked out. Sasuke was happy. The Uchiha clan—the entirety of it, all sitting at that one little table in a restaurant—was happy.

And here he was, once again, to ruin it all.

As if on cue, Jun landed on the roof next to him and took a seat, her feet dangling off of the edge. “Cute, aren’t they?”

Itachi quickly wiped the tears from his eyes.

“You know,” she said, “I just realized something about you. I picked you because you were, you know, Itachi Uchiha. The cold-blooded murderer who killed off his entire clan just to prove his own power. I thought you hated them all. Most of all your brother, the person who killed you.”

 _Fuck._ Itachi sniffled, trying to pull himself together, even though it was already too late.

“But it doesn’t matter,” Jun said. “Whatever secrets you’re keeping from me, I’ll find them out eventually. And makes my life easier if I know you love them. It means you have things to lose.”

“You said he was in trouble,” Itachi said.

“He is. They all are. They just don’t know it yet.”

“What’s the Scroll of the Ancient Healer?”

Jun looked at him. “It’s getting late. Don’t you think it’s about time you went to bed? You’ve got a long day ahead of you tomorrow.”

He couldn’t stand the idea of having to do this again tomorrow. Of his suffering not having an end point, not even death. It felt like he was in Hell, and he felt like he deserved it.

“How long are you going to do this for?” he asked.

“Don’t worry about that.” She tapped the tip of his nose with her finger. “You just worry your pretty little head about hunting down that scroll tomorrow for me, okay?”

Itachi looked back down through the window of the restaurant. Sakura was making a spectacle of kissing a very annoyed Sarada goodbye, while Sasuke looked on and smirked. _Forgive me, Sasuke,_ he thought. _For causing nothing but suffering every time our paths cross._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In my head, Sasuke and Sakura as parents are like a much angstier version of Bob and Linda Belcher.
> 
> Also, now there's a MURDER MYSTERY because in addition to being a nerd, I am one of Those Girls Who Know Too Much About True Crime. But how does the body in the woods relate to Itachi and Jun, you may be asking?
> 
> Thanks to everyone who's read or left comments or kudos so far! And to answer some people's questions about whether or not Sasuke recognizes Itachi, you'll have to wait until the ~next chapter~ to find out.


	6. must be the clouds in my eyes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> During a training session with the genin, Sasuke senses a disturbing, familiar presence in the Uchiha training grounds.

The next morning, Sasuke took Team Seven and Team Ten to the Uchiha training grounds to practice shuriken drills.

Since Moegi had been sent to the Sand with Konohamaru, Sasuke had agreed to spend the day working with her students, too. After all, the last time he’d had the chance to see all of his friends’ kids in action was the final round of the chunin exams. It was interesting to see how far they’d all progressed since then, how far they’d come in mastering their clans’ techniques.

He had also thought that this would be a useful exercise in reminding Sarada that she had friends in the village who loved her, before they had their little talk about how the village had ordered the massacre of their entire family. But it didn’t seem like she needed the friendship-is-your-real-power talk, honestly. Sakura had told him that Sarada was well-liked by her peers, but he hadn’t realized until that day that she was _popular._

Boruto was the ringleader, because of fucking _course_ he was, but Sarada was right up there with him. Both of them looked completely at ease chattering away with their friends, laughing and smiling and whining about training. Truth be told, the six kids were having so much fun hanging out that he was having a hard time getting them to stay focused, but a part of him didn’t even want to stop their fun.

Before everything had gone to hell, there had been a brief window of time when he was a genin where things had felt like this—the days of trying to see under Kakashi’s mask or rounding up lost ostriches or whatever other mischief he and Team Seven had gotten into. For a little while there, he’d just been a stupid kid hanging out with other stupid kids, and he’d been able to forget about vengeance of a couple minutes at a time. All Sasuke could do was hope that Sarada knew how important this time with her friends was, how she shouldn’t take it for granted.

And hope that he wouldn’t be the one who took it all away from her.

“You still have one more target to hit,” Sasuke called out to them. “Come on, guys. Pay attention.”

They’d done a typical version of target practice for a couple of hours. For the final part of their training session, he’d set them to solving a puzzle of sorts, one that he’d spent way more time than he’d ever admit coming up with. He’d drawn a line in the dirt, put several targets high up in the trees and around corners, and told them to put at least one shuriken in each target without setting foot over the line. The kids had somehow talked each other into believing that the rule was that they had to keep one foot _on_ the line at all times—and Sasuke, figuring that there was a lesson somewhere in there about questioning authority or critical thinking or something, didn't correct them, waiting for them to realize it on their own. Still, even believing that they had to stand in one spot, they had managed to hit every target but one, which was both too high up and too close for them to hit from where they were.

Inojin picked up a shuriken, scowling. “This is unfair,” he mumbled. “Shuriken justu is Sarada’s specialty. Why do we have to drill it?”

Sarada pulled on a cocky little sneer and held up a peace sign.

“I’ve already tried to have this argument with him,” Boruto muttered back. “He’s not going to listen.”

Sasuke gave Inojin and Boruto both a karate-chop to the top of the head, one after the other, just hard enough to make them flinch.

“Ow!” Inojin said.

 _“Hey!”_ Boruto said.

“We’re doing this because Moegi and Konohamaru say that you guys are getting about lazy fundamentals,” Sasuke said. “It’s not enough to have two or three flashy techniques that you can do perfectly—by now you’ve all encountered scenarios where your specialties don’t work. You need to have a wide range of options, and you need to be able to think on your feet. _Especially_ now that you’re getting promoted and put on higher-ranked missions. Up until this point, you might have been able to get away with relying on your natural abilities and your clans’ techniques. But you should all be aware by now that in a real battle, clan names and good grades at the Academy won’t save you."

All six of them had fallen silent, their faces more serious now than they had been all day. And he couldn't blame them. All of them knew what it was like to be completely outmatched.

"And," he added, "while you guys were skating by, all of the shinobi who came from _nothing_ —who have had to fight for every scrap of recognition you guys were born with—have been putting in the work. Now that you guys are growing up and starting to put on muscle, they’re going to see that work pay off, while you guys are stuck at the same level.”

Chocho muttered to Sarada, in a low voice that Sasuke was probably not supposed to hear, “As long as that means the boys are _finally_ gonna hit puberty, too.” Sarada waggled her eyebrows. Sasuke decided that he was going to ignore the both of them.

“You say that like you know from experience,” Shikadai said to him.

“Absolutely,” Sasuke said. “The stupidest guy from my Academy class is the Hokage, and it’s because he worked ten times as hard as everyone else.” He could feel Boruto cringe at the praise of his father, but that didn’t make it not true.

“So did you hit a plateau when you were a genin, too?” Shikadai asked. “How did you get past it?"

_I formed an alliance with a terrorist to get power and deserted the village. Tried to kill my best friend. Succeeded in killing my brother. Joined a terrorist organization. Killed a Leaf Village leader. Tried to kill my friends again. Helped start a war. Helped end the war to further my own half-baked quest for world domination. Tried to kill my best friend again._

Boruto, no doubt thinking of what he’d learned when they travelled to the Leaf Village of the past, was watching Sasuke.

“You work hard,” Sasuke answered. “You go on your missions, and when you’re not on your missions, you put the hours in on the training grounds. You listen to the people who have already been through this and have already had every dark and horrible and self-defeating thought you’re having. When they tell you that it’s not going to feel like this forever, you listen to them.” He pointed at the target. “And when they tell you to throw a shuriken at a target, Inojin Yamanaka and Boruto Uzumaki, you quit whining and you throw the goddamn shuriken at the goddamn target.”

Evidently chastised, both boys started aiming for the target again—although Inojin didn’t do so without letting out a small, yet distinguishable, sigh. God, he had inherited Ino’s flair for the theatrical.

Then Sasuke heard a twig snap somewhere in the trees, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up.

He looked up. It felt like someone was watching him from the treetops, like there was some dark, looming presence in the shadows. 

Like the one he’d felt the night before.

As soon as he’d walked in the door after work last night, he’d been hit by a feeling of dread. He felt it physically—a chill down his spine, a pit in his stomach, the feeling of alarms ringing in his ears—before his brain could even put together that something was wrong.

The logical part of his brain had realized that his fight-or-flight instincts were kicking in because there was something off about the chakras he could sense nearby—partially because Sakura’s was missing, and partially because what he _could_ sense felt both overwhelming and familiar. He'd picked out Sarada’s and Boruto’s chakras easily. There was something else there, too, but since he could sense some chakra that was weirdly similar to Orochimaru’s, he'd felt pretty confident about his guess that the other person was Mitsuki.

And then Sarada had emerged from the kitchen, and then the feeling of dread had passed. And then there was Boruto dragging Mitsuki up the hallway, exactly as he’d guessed.

He’d spent the rest of the night trying to convince himself that it was nothing. That he’d just been a little emotionally raw from therapy and from having had multiple conversations about his dead family, and that he’d gotten spooked. But why would the presence of three genin—of _his own daughter_ , his pupil, and their best friend—freak him out so much?

And now he knew for sure that he’d been full of shit, because he’d been with the Team Seven and Team Ten all day, and he was only just _now_ feeling that sense of terror again.

He tried to remain calm, trying not to let whoever it was know that he’d sensed them. He activated his visual prowess and tried to sense anything nearby, filtering through all the kids’ chakras and slowly expanding his search through the woods.

And then he felt a small flash of something. Something that felt _familiar._ Something that inspired an almost primordial sense of fear in him, like something that had been deeply ingrained in him as a child—

He felt sick to his stomach.

The flash of whatever he’d sensed disappeared. It was gone so quickly that a part of himself really wanted to pretend that it had never happened, that whatever was happening was just his anxiety playing tricks on him.

But he’d had a feeling like this before.

It wasn’t the feeling at the very end—the feeling of his brother looking him in the eyes, saying he was sorry, saying that he loved him. It wasn’t even the feeling in the beginning, the feeling of love and blind adoration for his big brother.

It was the feelings in the middle. The horrible, desperate ones. The feeling of getting home to the compound a little too late at night and finding it suspiciously quiet. The feeling of somebody watching him from up on a utility pole. Of staring down a long hallway and seeing a stoic man in a cloak staring back at him with glowing, cold eyes, of watching a bloodied, dying man limp towards him with a loving smile that didn’t make any sense.

 _It’s not Itachi,_ he said to himself. _Don’t be stupid. Itachi’s been dead and buried for a decade and a half. He’s been dead for longer than your teenage child has been alive. Dead for as much many years of your life as he was alive for._

He kept scanning the trees, but whatever it was, it was gone. All he could see were some birds in the branches over their heads.

 _You watched your brother fade into the afterlife with your own eyes,_ Sasuke told himself. _It’s not him. This is all just because you’ve been thinking about him, with everything that’s going on with Sarada. That’s all. You’re just jumpy._

“Hey, Sasuke,” Shikadai said suddenly. “Is the rule that we have to stay _on_ the line?”

Sasuke snapped back to the training exercise. It took his brain a second to come back down enough for him to process what Shikadai said, and then he smirked. _Finally_. “I never said anything about staying _on_ the line. I just told you that you couldn’t _pass_ the line.”

Sarada looked up at the target, and then back down at the line. _“Ohhhhhhhhh_. This was a _trick._ "

“What?” Mitsuki and Boruto asked.

What Sasuke expected to happen after that was that Shikadai or Sarada would move twenty feet back, climb up high in the trees, and hit the target themselves. He did _not_ expect what happened next, which was that Shikadai took hold of Inojin’s shoulders and moved him a few feet back from the line.

“What’s happening?” Inojin asked.

“Right now we’re too close to the target and we’re too low to the ground, so the trajectory isn’t right,” Shikadai said. “But if we start from further back and go at a wider angle, we can knock each other’s shuriken in the right direction.” He looked at Sarada. “And then you go last, so if we’re off at all, you can see it and correct it.”

Sarada nodded. “Right.”

Shikadai set up each of the genin in a wide arc, so that when Chocho threw the first shuriken, each of the following people in the formation could bounce another shuriken off of it. This corrected the shuriken’s path so that they were able to knock the shuriken onto the right trajectory with the right momentum, with Sarada course-correcting with the Sharingan at the end to make sure it hit. It took them a couple of tries, but when they finally got it, all six of them let out excited shouts of joy. Sarada raised her hands in the air in victory and looked at her father, her eyes still glowing red, but bright and ecstatic.

Sasuke smiled. This wasn’t the solution that he had expected them to come up with, but it worked. This was why he’d insisted that they promote Shikadai to chunin, after all.

After they hit the target, the kids sat under the trees to catch their breaths and drink some water. Boruto looked up at Sasuke suspiciously. “Was this entire thing an elaborate metaphor about friendship and teamwork?” he asked.

“Yup,” Sasuke answered immediately. He hadn't meant it to be, and there were multiple ways for each of them to have hit the target individually, but the metaphor thing served his purposes better.

Chocho pulled a bag of chips out of seemingly nowhere. "I think it's a _great_ lesson," she said. "I think we all could use a reminder of how great I am to work with."

"Is _that_ what the lesson was about?" Shikadai asked, and Inojin snickered.

Chocho ignored them. She ripped the bag open, ate a couple of handfuls, and then held the bag out to the others.

Mitsuki took a couple of chips, and then looked up at the trees. “It’s spooky out here with all the crows, though, isn’t it?” he said mildly.

Sasuke turned to him. “Crows?”

Sarada tilted her head back to look up at the treetops, too. “I know, right? I feel like they’ve been following me and watching me all day.”

Boruto looked up, too. “Huh. Weird.”

The feeling of dread returning, Sasuke looked up at the trees around them. There were at least a dozen crows—probably more—in the treetops above them, watching silently, peering down with their creepy, beady little eyes.

It suddenly felt hard to breathe.

“Stay here and talk amongst yourselves,” Sasuke said. He jumped into the treetops, not surprised in the least when the crows immediately scattered. He activated his visual prowess again, looking around desperately.

Crows meant Itachi. Or, if he were being logical, crows meant a living, breathing human being who knew enough about him and his brother to know that crows would send a message. But he didn't know who that could be, and there was nothing else that he could sense nearby.

Boruto landed in the tree beside him. “Sasuke? Is everything okay?”

Sasuke did one last scan of the treetops, and then he deactivated his Sharingan and looked at his student. “It’s fine.”

“Are you sure?” Boruto smirked. “Are you scared of all birds or just crows specifically?”

“Shut up.” Sasuke tried to relax, tried to go along with the good-natured teasing, tried to be okay. _Your brother is dead. He’s not here. Everyone is fine. Look at how we’re all joking around. Everything is okay now._

Boruto looked at him. “Hey, while we’re alone, can I ask you about something? I know you said not to tell anyone about what happened when we went back in time, but—”

Sasuke cut him off. “Konohamaru told me. Sarada and I are going to have a conversation about it soon.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Sasuke immediately felt guilty for snapping at him. It wasn't like this was Boruto’s fault. “I owe you an apology for putting you in a difficult position,” he said. “There were a lot of reasons why things had to happen in the order that they are, but I know that keeping secrets from your friends isn’t easy.”

“Of course. I’m just . . . surprised that she doesn’t know by now, is all. Sarada is the toughest person I know. There’s nothing I found out about in the past that she can’t handle.”

 _What you found out in the past isn’t the part I’m worried about,_ Sasuke thought.

Instead of answering, Sasuke kept looking at his student. As much as a small part of him cringed at yet another Uchiha needing to be rescued by a small, blond moron, the Uzumaki boys did have a talent for reining in the Uchihas’ worst impulses, not to mention for talking homicidal maniacs off of ledges.

“I’m not sure when my conversation with Sarada is actually going to happen,” Sasuke said, “but it’ll be important for her to know that her friends support her.”

“Of course. Sarada is always going to have me.” Realizing what he’d said, Boruto gestured at the others below them, his cheeks turning red. “I mean _us._ She’s going to have all of us. We all look out for each other.”

Sasuke didn’t miss what just happened, but he decided that that was a problem for a future time. After all, Sarada and Boruto each having someone who cared about them was not really, in the grand scheme of things, an issue. Still, he wondered if Sakura ever got tired of being right.

Sasuke got to his feet. “Good. Because having friends to support you—”

“—is the most important part of being successful as a shinobi, yes, I know.”

“Good.” Sasuke jumped out of the tree, and Boruto followed after him.

When they both landed on the ground, Sarada's eyes darted back and forth between him and Boruto. “Everything okay, Dad?” she asked.

“Everything’s fine. Don’t worry.”

There was nothing wrong. The crows were probably nothing. And if they _were_ something, then Sasuke would just have to tell Naruto that there was someone lurking around outside the village. Just a random rogue ninja. That was all.

“We’re done for the day,” Sasuke said. “Let’s head back to the village.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can we talk about all of the great Uchiha Family Content in some of the most recent episodes? Like, YES, give me the Uchiha family drama that I CRAVE.
> 
> Also is anyone else burying themselves in a hole and editing fanfiction to avoid thinking about certain upcoming real-world events or is that just me tonight? Hahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
> 
> Anyway, thank you for all of your views/kudoses/comments! I really appreciate them!


	7. my loneliness ain't killing me no more

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sakura snuggles with her daughter and husband, reflects on the ways that the tragedy of the Uchiha clan has shaped her worldview, and tries to solve the mystery of the girl found outside the Leaf Village.

It was three in the morning, and Sakura Uchiha was lying across her couch with her feet hanging over the arm, staring up at the autopsy file with a scowl.

She had spent almost every waking hour of the past day and a half trying to figure out what the deal was with the teenage girl that Team Ten had found coming home from their mission. When they’d brought the body in the night before, she’d stayed at work almost until midnight, talking with Naruto and with Kiba, who was acting as the representative of the Leaf Police Force, about what could’ve happened.

“I mean, your examination confirmed that the Unidentified Person was sick, right, Sakura?” Kiba had asked.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t explain how she ended up in a cave,” Naruto had said in between mouthfuls of ramen. “That would still mean that somebody dumped her there."

“Besides,” Sakura had added, “there are things about that examination that don’t make any sense. If she was left there, how did she end up with scrapes on her hands with gravel from the caves in them? Injuries like that could’ve only happened while she was still alive.”

“Couldn’t she have . . . hiked there?” Kiba had suggested half-heartedly.

“She’s not an _animal._ Humans don’t go find secure little hidey holes to curl up in when they get sick,” Sakura had said. “And how could somebody was that sick have even made it up in those caves? Moegi said that _she_ had trouble getting up there.”

“I know,” Kiba had admitted. “It doesn’t make sense. And either way, it doesn’t explain who she is.”

The forensics team did an autopsy that morning, and Sakura had spent the entirety of her work day reading and re-reading the report. It confirmed _exactly_ what her own examination had told her: that the Unidentified Person had died of lung and heart failure at some point within the last day, but that there were a few cuts and scrapes found on the body that seemed to have come from the cave and had partially healed in a way that indicated that they'd happened before death.

And none of that explained who the girl even was in the first place, or why she’d been all alone.

Even after she’d gotten home, Sakura hadn’t been able to fall asleep, and she’d tossed and turned all night. Finally, she’d left Sasuke in bed, pulled on a sweatshirt, made herself some tea, and set up camp in the living room with the files.

She knew perfectly well that there wasn’t anything that she could do at that exact moment. That even if she figured it out, she couldn’t heal a person who was miles away from her, much less one who was already dead.

But not doing anything felt worse.

Sakura knew what it felt like to be helpless. Forgotten. Overlooked. Even though it was already too late, she felt a need to protect this young woman. Somebody in this girl’s life had failed her, but Sakura wasn’t about to.

No matter how many hours she had to spend staring at this stupid, nonsensical file, trying to fit together puzzle pieces that didn’t match.

Just as she was about to throw the file across the room in frustration, she heard the sound of small footsteps coming from up the hallway.

“Go back to bed,” she called out, suppressing a smile.

“ _You_ go back to bed.” Sarada poked her head in the room. “I’m just getting water. Do you want anything from the kitchen?”

Sakura held up her cup of now-lukewarm tea. “Can you top this off with some hot water, please?”

While Sarada went into the kitchen, Sakura sat up straight and pulled her legs underneath her. A few moments later, Sarada returned with a cup of water for herself and a mug of tea for her mother.

“Thanks, lovey,” Sakura said, taking her tea back. “Couldn’t sleep?”

“I have a headache from using the Sharingan during training today. I was just getting some medicine.” Sarada sat down on the couch next to her mother and nodded towards the folder in her mother’s lap. “What about you? Is it that case with that girl?”

“Yeah. I couldn’t fall asleep.”

“And reading an autopsy file at three in the morning is going to help with that?”

“It was already keeping me up. I thought I may as well just _be_ awake and look at it.”

Clearly still three-quarters of the way asleep, Sarada slid closer and rested her head on her mother’s shoulder. “For all the time that we spend making fun of Dad for being married to work, you aren’t any better.”

“Be nice to your mother.” With a smile, Sakura wrapped her arm around her daughter.

It was nice to have Sarada home.

She wasn’t going to pretend that it hadn’t been fun for the two weeks that Sarada had been away on her most recent mission, when it was just her and Sasuke. Those two weeks were probably the longest they’d been together child-free since Sarada had been born, now that Sasuke was finally staying home more. But as fun as having the extra privacy had been, she’d missed Sarada terribly, like she always did when Sarada went away on missions. It made her feel a twinge of guilt for all the time she’d spent blowing off her own parents as a teenager.

“Hey, do you know anything about the Scroll of the Ancient Healer?” Sarada asked suddenly.

That was a term Sakura hadn’t heard in a long time. “What makes you ask that?”

“Yesterday, Mitsuki, Boruto, and I met a university student who’s writing his thesis on it. And it came up while I was on the mission in the Sand, too. I figured if it’s legit, you would’ve heard about it.”

“I have, but it’s a pretty niche thing to write a thesis about.” She knew that Tsunade had mentioned it before, and she racked her brain to remember what she'd said. “There’s a myth that there was an ancient priestess who had discovered a way to reverse any physical damage. It was an equivalent exchange type of deal—like, if you fell and scraped your knee, I could prick my finger and draw the same amount of blood and heal you. Or, like, Dad loses his arm in battle, and I could cut off somebody else’s leg to regenerate it. And if somebody died, you could sacrifice another person to bring them back. It’s almost like the Reanimation Jutsu in that way, actually.”

“But it’s a myth? It’s not real?” Sarada asked.

“I don’t think so. It’s probably just one of those folktales from back in the old days, when people made up stories to explain the world to themselves.”

Sarada snuggled a little closer to her mother. “Speaking of explaining things, Dad said he’s gonna tell me what happened to the rest of the family.”

Sakura felt her heart start to race. “He told me. I’m happy that you two had the chance to talk about it.”

When she’d gotten in from work the night before, Sasuke had told her that he’d talked to Sarada. And since this was the first time that she and Sarada had been alone together since then, Sakura wasn’t surprised that it had come up.

But she knew exactly what question was coming next, even before Sarada could ask it. Sakura had spent a lot of time thinking about how she'd answer that question—since the first time she’d had to dodge her toddler’s questions about when Daddy was coming home from his mission.

“You know whatever it is he’s going to tell me, don’t you?” Sarada asked. “Why didn’t _you_ tell me?”

“It’s partially because not all of it is my story to tell. It’s a really personal thing for your dad, and there’s a lot of it that I wasn’t actually there for. But it’s also because you deserved to have the best possible version of this conversation, and it would have been irresponsible to try to do that before now.”

“Because you thought I was too young, or because of Dad?”

“Both,” Sakura admitted. It sucked to have to say it out loud, but pretending like Sasuke had been a flawless husband and father wasn’t going to help any of them. “But,” Sakura added, “I really think that when all is said and done, you’re going to understand and appreciate why we wanted you to reach a certain level of maturity first.”

“Maybe.” Sarada didn’t sound convinced. “I just wish you would have told me that there _was_ something, instead of acting like everything was normal for so long when I could tell that it wasn’t.”

Sakura smirked. “You and I both know perfectly well that if I had given you an inch, you’d go digging for information on your own, and then I’d just have to go through the hassle of correcting whatever misinformation you’d gathered.”

“That’s basically what ended up happening anyway with Karin.”

“Fair point.”

There was a delicate line between explaining to her daughter why they’d waited and scaring her shitless about how bad the conversation was going to be before they even had it. And truthfully, Sakura wasn’t sure where that line was.

She herself had been _completely_ shattered the night she learned the truth about Itachi, and she’d already been an adult who’d witnessed a significant portion of the story firsthand by the time she learned it. The night she learned the truth had changed _everything_ for her: not just her relationship with her partner, but her entire view of the shinobi world.

* * *

In the period when she and Sasuke had first started reconnecting after the war, he had opened up to her bit by bit about the things that had happened when he was away from the village, but they never talked about his brother. Even when they were kids, Itachi had been a No-Go Zone in terms of conversation topics, and she had assumed that it was very much still off-limits now that Itachi had died by Sasuke’s hand. She’d known how tormented Sasuke still was by everything, and she’d known that the only thing she could do was let him heal in his own time.

Then there had been that night while they were travelling away from the village together, after they’d started dating but before they’d eloped. It was a cold, wintery night, and they’d been curled up together in front of a campfire and under several blankets to keep warm. In between bouts of making out, Sakura had been catching him up on village gossip, recapping some stupid argument she’d had to referee between Ino and Sai.

“Sometimes it’s like the old days with Sai, where he doesn’t know when it’s in his own best interest to keep his mouth shut,” she’d said, grinning. “Poor guy. Somebody should’ve thought this through before they set of all these maladjusted, grown-ass ex-ANBUs on the village that we all gotta deal with now. Kakashi and Yamato are barely any better. Fucking Danzo, that piece of shit—”

The Sasuke that she was travelling with felt like a dramatically different person from the one she’d known as a teenager, so it wasn’t until he fell suspiciously quiet that Sakura remembered how Danzo had died.

She’d gotten pretty good at not running her mouth when it was clear that Sasuke was uncomfortable with a conversation topic, and she was sure that he was not especially eager to be reminded of the time that he’d assassinated a Leaf Village elder in a fit of passion. But she’d never liked Danzo, and she liked him even less the more that came out about the Foundation. And she could feel Sasuke’s heart racing through his shirt, and she felt like she needed to say _something_ to comfort him.

“I mean, Sai _certainly_ didn’t love his time in the Foundation, based on the very little he’s told me,” she’d said. “I know Danzo thought he was doing what was best for the village, and I know that you aren’t supposed to speak ill of the dead, but I don’t think the village is any worse off.”

She’d untangled herself from their cuddle pile to go get more firewood, and that was when he’d said, his voice quiet and pained:

“ . . . Danzo made Itachi do it.”

Sakura had had a lot of hard nights over the years, but the night that Sasuke told her the truth about his brother was one of the hardest. She’d never had her faith so shaken in the system she’d devoted her life to. She’d never been so _angry_. For a split second, she’d even understood the seventeen-year-old homicidal maniac version of Sasuke that she’d met on the bridge. If she’d been in his shoes, she wasn’t sure that she would have reacted any better.

Itachi had seemed so much older than them back when they were kids. But he’d only been thirteen fucking years old. He’d been a _child._ And every single adult and system that should have protected him—his father, Danzo, Lord Third, the entire Leaf Village—had let him down.

“I’ve wanted to tell you,” Sasuke had said. “For a really long time. Because I don’t think there’s a version of us that works where I have to keep it a secret from you. I don’t know how to be myself or be okay if I have to pretend that this didn’t happen."

She’d held him in her arms while he cried and told her every secret he’d been forced to keep about what his brother had done for him and the Leaf Village. And she’d sworn to herself that as long as there was anything in the world that she could do about it, nobody was ever going to suffer the way that Sasuke or Itachi had ever again.

* * *

Sakura looked down at Sarada, who was still sleepily peering up at her. She put her tea on the closest side-table so she could wrap her other arm around her daughter, too.

Even though she knew that so much of what had happened to Sasuke was completely beyond her control, there was still a small, irrational part of her that felt like there was more she should’ve done to protect him. She would die before she let any of that happen to Sarada.

“I know we didn’t make things easy on you, honey,” Sakura told her. “But we really did make a conscious decision to, you know, teach you how to swim before we threw you in the deep end of the pool. And I’m really proud of the young woman that you’ve become, even in spite of how hard things have been. And I love you very much.”

Sarada rolled her eyes and smiled. Like her father, Sarada got uncomfortable when people gave her sincere compliments. “I love you, too, Mom—”

There was a cry of pain from the other room.

Sakura’s body was in motion before her brain had even fully registered what had happened. Before she knew it, she was standing in the doorway to her and Sasuke’s bedroom.

Sasuke was sitting in bed upright, hyperventilating, clutching his heart. His eyes locked onto hers as soon as she entered the room, and she could see the Mangekyo Sharingan glowing. He let out a sob and clapped his hand over his mouth.

 _Oh, shit._ The good news was that apparently, there was no actual threat in the apartment. The bad news . . . .

“I’m sorry,” he rasped, his voice hoarse. “It was just a dream. I’m sorry—”

“Babe, it’s okay.” She sat on the edge of the bed and put her hands on his shoulders. “Don’t worry. We’re all safe. Everything is okay.”

He was trying so hard to stop crying, she could tell, but he could hardly catch his breath.

There was a creak from the floorboards in the doorway, and Sasuke’s head whipped around.

Sakura turned to the doorway, too. Sarada looked a little nervous, as if she hadn’t meant to attract attention to herself. She’d activated her own Sharingan, her glowing red eyes almost the only thing visible from the dark hallway. “Sorry. I’m right here, Dad.”

“Sarada, can you get your dad a glass of water, please?” Sakura asked. Without realizing it, she’d started speaking in her Medical Captain Voice, the one she used when she needed people to obey her without question. And Sarada, who’d heard the voice enough times in her life, immediately headed up the hallway.

While she was gone, Sakura brushed the hair out of Sasuke’s face. He was so sweaty that it was sticking to his skin.

Sasuke took a shaky breath. “My brother—”

“He’s not here.” It was unclear if Itachi was the villain of his nightmare or the victim, so she’d have to keep it general. “It was just a dream, all right? There’s nothing to be scared of.”

He brushed his tears away with the back of his hand. “I’m sorry,” he said softly.

Sarada came back into the room with a glass of water, her Sharingan deactivated. Sasuke wiped at his eyes again and tried to collect himself.

“Thanks, Peanut,” he said, his voice still hoarse, as he took the glass from her.

Sarada scrunched up her nose at him. She hated being called Peanut, and these days he only ever did it to tease her, so Sakura knew that he was okay enough to crack jokes. Or at least okay enough to be thinking about how to _fake_ being okay.

Sasuke’s hand shook as he brought the glass to his lips. This was a trick that Sakura had taught him back in the day, after she’d learned it from the children’s hospital: to slowly drink a whole glass of ice-cold water to diffuse a state of panic, because it was impossible to cry or hyperventilate and to drink the water at the same time.

When he was done, Sarada took it back from him. “You okay, Dad?” she asked.

Sasuke looked a lot calmer, and his voice was back to normal. “Yeah. Just a bad dream. I’m sorry for scaring you.”

“You didn’t scare me.”

Sasuke wrapped his arm around Sarada’s shoulders and kissed the top of her head. It seemed to Sakura like he was holding onto her extra tightly, which only made her more worried about how bad his nightmare must’ve been. Everyone who'd fought in the war had nightmares, and they came and went in varying degrees of severity. But it had been a _long_ time since she'd seen Sasuke _this_ rattled by one.

“Sarada, why don’t you go back to bed, babe?” Sakura suggested. “It’s late, and Dad might need a little bit to calm down. We’ll talk in the morning, okay?”

“Yeah,” Sarada said. “Sure. Just . . . let me know if you need anything.”

After their daughter left the room and shut the door behind her, Sasuke let out a sigh and covered his face with his hand. “Did I scare her?”

“Nah, she’s seen me have war nightmares before. She knows what it is. She’ll be okay.”

“I’m sorry.”

It had been a _bad_ dream. She could tell because he had apologized at least five times now, and apologizing profusely over nothing was one of the tell-tale signs that he wasn’t doing well.

She laid back in bed and held out her arms to him. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Sasuke laid down and rested his head on her chest, wrapping his arm around her waist. It took him a second to start talking. “It was the dream where I walk up to the door looking for my parents. And I was still a kid, but it was the door to _this_ apartment. And when I opened the door, my parents were already there, but then Itachi killed you and Sarada, and then he coughed up a bunch of blood and dropped dead. But I was still just a kid, and I couldn’t move or do anything.”

Sakura’s heart broke. She hated that there wasn’t anything she could do to take his pain away. She hated that he could do everything in the world right, and that all of this could still come back to smack him in the face so many years later. She hated everything and everyone that would put a person through so much suffering, all for arbitrary things like power and authority.

“Do you think it’s because you’re planning on telling her?” she asked, tracing patterns on his back with her fingertips. “Is it bringing some stuff up?”

“Probably.”

Sasuke was prone to giving one-word answers even on his best days, but there was something about the silence now that made her nervous. “What?” she asked.

He hesitated. “Nothing. I think I’m just being jumpy.”

She wasn’t sure that she believed him. But lately, he’d been so much better about speaking up when he needed things. If he wasn’t ready to talk about it yet, she wasn’t going to push him.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“You don’t have to apologize for having a nightmare, silly.”

He sighed. “I hate that I always do this to you.”

“You don’t always do anything to me.”

“I feel like I’m always forcing you to be the glue that holds my life together. I’m always forcing you to clean up after me.” His voice cracked. “I just want us to be normal.”

“We _are_ normal.” To lighten the mood, she poked the top of his head and grinned at him. “Listen, I’m about due for my period, which means at some point within the next week _I’m_ going to fall to pieces, and _you’re_ going to have to hold me and feed me ice cream when I start crying about how inadequate I feel as both a mother and a kunoichi. Would that make you feel like we’re even?”

Sasuke let out a snort. “No, because that’s not even remotely the same thing. But I’ll do it.” He shifted so that he was lying on his stomach so he could look at her. “Speaking of which, is everything okay? Why weren’t you in bed?”

“I was out in the living room. I couldn’t sleep, and I didn’t want to turn the lights on and wake you up.”

Sasuke put the pieces together. “Were you reading the autopsy report?”

Sakura sighed. “Yeah, Sarada didn’t love that answer, either.”

“What was she doing up?”

“Just a Sharingan headache. She’s totally fine.” Sakura reached out to play with his hair, curling the ends of it around her fingers. Because it sometimes helped to just talk _at_ him to keep him distracted when he was upset, she continued, “She was asking me about some weird, obscure piece of medical history.”

“Why?”

“I dunno. Some dude’s writing a thesis on it?”

His forehead wrinkled. “What is it?”

“The Scroll of the Ancient Healer.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s a bootleg version of the Reanimation Jutsu, basically.”

“Oh, _good_ ,” Sasuke said dryly.

Sakura smiled. “Don’t worry. It’s just a story.”

But suddenly, the gears in her head started turning. It had been a _long_ time since she’d thought about the Reanimation Jutsu. And yes, nothing in the Unidentified Person’s file resembled the Reanimation Justu as they understood it.

But there was something weird and unexplained going on with the Unidentified Person, and there were plenty of weird justu being developed all the time. And the more ethically dubious a new justu was, the less likely Sakura was to have heard of it.

“What?” Sasuke asked.

As much as her hands itched to go look at the folder again, she knew that the more pressing priority at that particular moment was making sure Sasuke was okay. “Nothing. It can wait until tomorrow.”

As if he could read her mind, he said, “If it’s about the autopsy report, I could use a distraction from my own brain right now.”

“Well . . . okay.” She brushed the hair out of Sasuke’s left eye so she could see his whole face. “This is going to sound weird, but go on this journey with me for a second. We know that the Unidentified Person died from organ failure, but she also has injuries that are consistent with her having been hiking in the caves that she was found in. So either somebody brought her to the caves after she died and she magically got scrapes on her hands, or she somehow gathered the strength to hike into the caves herself immediately before she died of multiple organ failure.”

“Neither of which make sense.”

“Right. But what if it’s _both_? What if she died of the organ failure and _then_ went hiking in the caves? What if she was reanimated or something?”

“They don’t leave their body behind when they get reanimated. When my brother . . . .” Sasuke stopped and started over. “Do you remember when Naruto was talking to Lord Fourth? He just kind of disintegrated in the end.”

“It might not be the one that Kabuto used. It might be a weird, new thing. And clearly it doesn’t work that well, since she didn’t _stay_ reanimated.”

“Maybe. But I’ve never seen any kind of jutsu like this.” He frowned. “But it does make slightly more sense than the other two options.”

“I know it’s a long shot,” Sakura said, “so I’m gonna sleep on it and see how stupid I think it sounds when it’s not three in the morning. And if it doesn’t sound stupid, I’m going to talk to Kabuto.”

Sasuke made a face.

“I know,” she said, smiling, “but he’s the only person I can think of who knows things about reanimating people. It’s that or wait to get security clearance to go bug Orochimaru.”

Sasuke leaned forward and kissed her. “You know, for all the time that you and Sarada spend shitting on me for being married to work—”

“That is almost _word-for-word_ what Sarada said to me.”

Sasuke smirked. “That’s my girl.” After a second, his expression faded into something more serious. “But. Still. I’m happy that the village has you to protect everyone. And I just don’t want you to think I take you or the life we have for granted.”

Sakura leaned up and kissed him again.

She didn’t take their life for granted, either. It had taken a lot of extraordinarily good luck to end up where they were—to have survived the war, to have had people in high places looking out for them, to have their loved ones, to be healthy and safe. It wasn’t always easy, but Sakura was happy, in a way that had seemed so impossible and out-of-reach when she was younger. She was an elite shinobi who could protect not only the village, but her loved ones. And she would keep fighting, until her dying breath, to protect them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wasn't gonna NOT name the Sakura chapter after a Britney Spears song.
> 
> Also, this took longer than I thought it would because this chapter ended up being ridiculously long, but also because it was harder than I expected to thread the needle between "~Sakura's husband is basically her second child and it's women's responsibility to heal broken men~" and "~Sakura is the Modern Woman Who Has It All and perfectly balances being a devoted wife and mother with being a badass career lady~". But I did my best!
> 
> Also, I think everything should start moving a little quicker plot-wise after this chapter.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who has read and enjoyed so far! I hope you are all staying safe!


	8. never took your side, never cursed your name

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sarada wonders how her father's nightmare relates to The Talk he is planning to have with her and seeks advice from "Eiji."

When Sarada went into the kitchen for breakfast, it was clear that her parents had no intention of discussing what had happened the night before. In fact, for all intents and purposes, it was a typical weekday morning in the Uchiha household—or at least what constituted a typical morning in the rare event that all three of them were home at the same time. While her father stood at the stove wearing her mother’s pink floral apron, cooking sunny-side-up eggs for the three of them, her mother sat at the table and read over her work files. Other than asking if Sarada had gotten back to sleep okay and giving her an extra pat on the head before they rushed out the door for work, neither of her parents made any mention of the long night they’d all had.

After breakfast, Sarada went to the training grounds to throw knives at things. She told herself that it was Sharingan training, since her muscles still reacted to her surroundings a split second slower than the Sharingan processed the information, and she thought that drilling the basics with her Sharingan activated might help. But she had to admit to herself that she was throwing her kunai with more emotion than precision, since even with her Sharingan, she wasn’t hitting the targets with the same level of accuracy as usual.

She was exhausted.

It had taken her a _long_ time to fall back asleep the night before. Even now, she couldn’t shake the mental image of her father sitting in bed with tears streaming down his face. Of his head whipping around when he’d heard the floorboards creak under her feet, and his Mangekyo Sharingan locking onto her, the terror clear on his face.

Sarada knew that the veterans had nightmares. After all, there had been a few times over the years when she’d been woken up in the middle of the night by the sounds of her mother crying. The first couple of times, when she was little, she’d climbed into her mother’s lap and deployed every silly little kid trick she knew until her mother smiled again. The most recent time, while her father was away on a mission a few months ago, she’d brought her mother a glass of water and then crawled under the covers with her, like she did when she’d been a little kid having nightmares of her own. Her mother never liked to talk about her war nightmares, but she’d told Sarada a couple of her war stories over the years, and they weren’t pretty.

And it wasn’t like Sarada was expecting her father to be the picture of masculine stoicism, either. Admittedly, he played the tough guy a lot, but it wasn’t like he was a brick wall. Especially not around her and her mother. She’d seen her father upset before, and angry, and frustrated, and worried.

But she’d never seen him that terrified before. Not by anything.

Besides, she wasn’t sure that his nightmare had been about the war at all. While she’d been hurrying up the hallway to get him water, she’d heard him choke out something about his brother—which was odd because, as far as Sarada could tell from the scattered stories she’d heard about Uncle Itachi, he’d died with the rest of the family ten years before the war had even started, during the mysterious event that her father had just promised to have A Very Serious Talk with her about. 

Sarada had known that whatever her father was going to tell her wasn’t good. But it was only sinking in now how _bad_ it might actually be, if even decades later it could frighten her brave, tough-as-nails father—Mr. "Emotions Have No Place On A Mission" himself—to the point of tears.

She was distracted from her worries by a few shadows passing overhead, and she glanced up at the sky to see three crows circling above her— _Like all those crows that were hanging around during training yesterday,_ she thought. These crows, however, seemed like they were flying oddly low, as if they weren’t afraid of her the way that birds were supposed to be afraid of people. As if they wanted her to notice them.

Impulsively, she put the kunai she was holding back in her pouch and held her arm up.

One of the crows flew down and perched on her arm. It turned its head towards her, and for a split second, she was nervous that the crow would try to peck her eyeballs out. But the crow just looked her in the eyes—almost like a person would—and then, after a few moments, it buried its beak in its wing to groom itself.

It was then that she felt the presence of somebody about ten yards behind her. She was worried that the crow would get startled and peck her if she moved too quickly, so she turned her head slowly, just far enough to be able to look over her shoulder.

She wasn’t completely surprised when she saw a flash of long, improbably red hair, or the light glinting off of a pair of glasses. But something told her to keep her Sharingan activated just in case.

“I’ve always liked crows,” Eiji said, as he walked closer to her. “Ever since I was little. People think they’re a bad omen, but it’s actually really easy to make friends with them.”

“Do they ever take the initiative to make friends with humans first?” she asked. “They’ve been following me around since yesterday.”

“They take a shine to people sometimes. Maybe they like you.”

“Maybe.” Her shoulder was starting to get sore from holding up the crow. “He’s heavier than I thought he would be,” she admitted.

“I’ll take him, if your arm is getting tired.” Eiji stopped beside her and held out his arm. Sarada put her arm next to his, and the crow stepped up onto Eiji’s forearm. It peered at him and cooed, and Eiji made the same little cooing noise back at it, the way someone might imitate their dog whining.

Sarada had been wondering what Eiji’s deal was since he had disappeared from her dining room without a trace two nights ago. She was still trying to decide whether or not she could trust him, whether her impulse when they’d first met that he was trustworthy enough to allow into her home had been correct. On the one hand, there was something weirdly calming about his presence, although she couldn’t put her finger on why. It was something about the way he’d been so kind and polite that first day they’d met, or the way he was being so gentle now with the crow.

On the other hand . . . .

“I thought you were a university student,” Sarada said.

Eiji kept his eyes on the crow. “I am a university student.”

“What happened the other night, then? Boruto and Mitsuki said you literally vanished into thin air. Where did you go?”

He still wasn’t looking at her. “That’s why I’m here. I wanted to apologize about that. Given what you said about your parents, I thought it would be best if there wasn’t a strange man in your apartment when your father got home. And I have a little bit of training in ninjitsu—although I switched to a specialized academic course instead after I graduated from the Academy—so I decided to make a quiet exit. That doesn’t make it any less rude, though.”

His voice was soft. Careful. Sarada wasn’t sure what to make of his answer.

Eiji held his arm up high, and the crow took flight. Finally, he turned back to Sarada. “You’ve awakened the Sharingan.”

It wasn’t phrased as a question, but she understood it to be one. “Yes, I have.”

“I’ve heard that not every member of the Uchiha bloodline is able to awaken it. That it only appears under extreme circumstances.”

It was another implied question. Sarada didn’t know much about how the Sharingan worked, but what Eiji was saying lined up with what that book in the library had told her: that the Sharingan awoke in response to emotional trauma.

She was not in the mood to discuss her particular brand of daddy issues with a stranger.

Instead, she said, “You seem to know an awful lot about the Uchiha clan.”

Eiji plastered on a polite smile. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to ask invasive personal questions. It’s just that I’ve spent a lot of time in libraries over the years studying the Leaf Village, and it’s exciting to see things in real life that I’ve only ever read about, like the Sharingan.”

She pulled out another kunai, but instead of throwing it, she held it in her hands. She thought about when she’d caught Eiji staring at her family pictures, when that polite veneer had cracked for just a few seconds, revealing a desperate loneliness underneath it. How he’d said that his whole family had died. And she thought about her father sitting in bed, hyperventilating, sobbing, apologizing to nobody.

“I’ll answer your invasive personal questions if you answer mine,” she offered.

Eiji seemed surprised, but he nodded. “Sure.”

He went and leaned against one of the nearby trees, crossing his arms over his chest, facing her. It seemed like he was intentionally trying to keep his hands where she could see them. Sarada didn’t know what to make of that, either.

Her eyes were getting tired, so she finally deactivated the Sharingan. She threw a kunai at the farthest target watched it land dead center. “You said that your family died when you were younger, right?”

He didn’t answer right away, as if this wasn’t what he was expecting her to ask. “Yes. They did.”

“If you don’t mind me asking, what happened to them?”

Again, Eiji paused. “They were killed. It was a turf war of sorts. Things haven’t always been as peaceful as they are now.”

 _I know,_ Sarada wanted to say. That’s all anybody ever told them, was how lucky they were to have grown up in a time of peace.

“How long ago did it happen?” she asked.

He sighed. “A long time. I was about your age.”

“And you’re the only one who survived?”

“My younger brother was spared. But we had a falling out in the aftermath of everything, so we don’t really talk anymore.”

Sarada didn’t know how to phrase what she wanted to ask. “How did you . . . ?”

“How did I what?” Eiji prompted gently.

She threw another kunai at the farthest possible target, and it landed not quite on the center. “How did you learn to be okay with defining yourself by people who aren’t here?” she finally asked.

“What do you mean?”

She pulled another kunai out of her pouch. But instead of throwing it, she turned and looked at him. “I feel like when I say that I’m an Uchiha, it _means_ something to people, even to random people on the street who I don’t know. I feel like other people have a better understanding of what it means than I do. _Every single part_ of my life is informed by that context that I don’t have. It feels like there’s all these ghosts around me all the time, but I don’t even know who the ghosts are. And maybe it’s different for people like you or my dad, who actually lived through losing everybody, and who know exactly who and what you’re missing. But . . . .” She felt a lump growing in her throat, and she swallowed. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I don’t know how to be the heir to a clan of three people. I don’t know how I’m supposed to carry around the Uchiha legacy for the rest of my life when there’s nobody here who can tell me what that even means.”

Eiji seemed to be thinking very carefully about his answer. “You have your father, right? It’s still not an easy burden, but it’s not one you have to carry alone.”

Sarada shook her head. “I can’t talk to him about stuff like this.”

“Why not?”

“Because . . . because he doesn’t know how to carry this, either,” she said, and it was only when she said it out loud that she realized that it was the truth. Her father was just as lost as she was. “Before a couple of days ago, he wouldn’t even acknowledge to me that there _is_ a specific thing that he’s avoiding talking about. He and Mom think that they’ve protected me and kept it a secret from me this whole time, but I know that he’s still affected by whatever happened. I don’t think he’d know how to help me even if I asked. It would just make them both worry even more to know that I was worrying—"

“They’d worry about you either way,” Eiji said softly. “They’re your parents.”

“I know. But if I can make things easier for them, I’d like to.”

Eiji was silent for a few more moments. Finally, he said, “It’s a funny thing, being part of a clan. I had a very complicated relationship with my family, and with my father in particular. He had a very specific idea of what our family name meant, as if even the toxic parts were worth protecting just because they were a part of our story. I wasn’t sure how to carry my family’s name even when we were all alive. But after everything happened . . . .” He pulled his arms a little closer to his chest, like he was giving himself a hug. “There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t wish that all of it never happened. My relationship with my family wasn’t always a good one, but I still miss them, and I still wonder if the decisions I made were the right ones that would honor the good parts of what our family stood for.”

“How do you know if they were?” Sarada asked him.

“You don’t. That’s the trouble.”

Her stomach twisted. “So what am I supposed to do?” she asked.

He looked at her for a few seconds longer, and then he pulled on a reassuring smile. “I think you just have to write your own story, Sarada. The Uchiha clan is a part of who you are, but it isn’t _all_ of who you are. The choices that people made in the past help inform who you are, but they don’t _define_ who you are. _You_ define that. Who you really are is something that lives in your heart, not something that other people can define for you. And you just have to trust that as long as you’re listening to that, you’re doing the best that you can do, and the people who love you are proud of you, whether they're here to tell you or not.” He shrugged and pulled on a smile. “I don’t know. Was that helpful at all?”

“I think so.” Sarada decided that she liked Eiji, even if she still wasn’t quite sure what to make of him. It was nice to talk to him. It was kind of what she imagined it felt like to have older cousins or older siblings to ask for advice. “Thanks, Eiji.”

“Sure.” Eiji nodded at her. “Your turn. How’d you get the Sharingan?”

Sarada remembered exactly where she was the first time she realized she had the Sharingan: in Orochimaru’s hideout, with Lord Seventh holding a mirror up to her tearstained face.

She found herself editing the story.

“It was my one major act of preteen rebellion while I was at the Academy,” she explained. “I had some big questions, and nobody would give me the answers, so my friend and I snuck out of the village to follow Lord Seventh and my father while they were travelling. What we didn’t know was that there was a guy hunting my dad and me to try to take our eyes. It was basically my first mission, and I wasn’t even out of the Academy yet, and this dude was coming at us to kill.”

“What happened to him?” Eiji asked. “Obviously he didn’t get your eyes.”

“Nope. His little army of clone children killed him.”

“That’s an unfortunate way to go.”

Sarada shrugged and threw another kunai at a target. “You shouldn’t unethically breed an army of weird clone children to farm their organs if you don’t want them to rise up and kill you one day.”

Eiji’s lips twitched. “Valid point.”

“SARADA!” called a familiar, annoyingly boisterous voice behind them. “SASU—wait, hold on. _Eiji?_ ”

Sarada and Eiji both turned around. Boruto was running up to them, with Mitsuki, Inojin, and Chocho following after.

Instead of greeting Sarada, Boruto rushed up to Eiji and stuck his finger in his face. “What the hell happened to you the other night, man? You scared the crap out of us!”

“Boruto, you’re being rude,” Sarada said.

“Wait, is this the dude you guys were talking about?” Inojin asked.

Sarada assumed that Boruto and Mitsuki had told the others about it. Sarada gestured between them. “This is Eiji. Eiji, meet Inojin Yamanaka and Chocho Akimichi.”

“Nice to meet you both,” Eiji said to both of them.

Chocho fluttered her eyelashes and pulled on a smile that Sarada knew all too well. “Nice to meet you, too, Eiji.”

Sarada swatted Chocho’s arm. _Gross,_ she thought _._ She knew that Chocho was kidding, but still. On top of the fact that Sarada got more of an older brother vibe from Eiji than anything, he was also _several_ years too old.

“So what happened the other night?” Mitsuki asked Eiji.

Eiji shrugged. “Sarada’s parents’ reputations precede them, and I decided that I didn’t want to know what happens to strange men who are in their house with their daughter and her friends when they aren’t home.” He looked at Sarada. “By the way, how much trouble did you get in?”

“None.” Sarada smirked. “They didn’t care as much because as far as they knew, it was just Team Seven. And I break the rules so rarely that when I _do_ , my parents usually either go, ‘Wow, that’s not like her, she must really be having a tough time, let’s cut her some slack,’ or they think it’s funny. I don't get in actual trouble very often."

Inojin rolled his eyes. “Someday we’re all gonna be in a room full of ANBU, and they’re going to ask, ‘When did you first start to suspect that Sarada Uchiha was evil?’ And I’m gonna tell them about this exact conversation.”

Eiji seemed taken aback and glanced at Sarada, almost like he was checking if her feelings were hurt. But Sarada’s smirk just got wider.

“I’m gonna tell them it was when you talked Boruto into signing up for the chunin exams against his will,” Mitsuki said.

“I’m gonna tell them it was when you made me keep your Sharingan a secret from the rest of the class so you could master it first and then beat Boruto up,” Chocho said.

“I’m gonna tell them it was when you made the entire class nominate me to be the field trip leader so I would have to stay with the group and behave myself,” Boruto said.

“Were any of those things actually _evil_ ,” Sarada asked, “or are they just signs that I’m a _great_ strategic thinker and am going to be a great Hokage?”

“It can be both,” Boruto said. “I don’t know if we’ve ever had an evil Hokage before. That could be a fun change of pace.”

Sarada put her hands on her hips. “So did you guys come all the way out here just to call me evil, or are you here for a reason?”

“Oh, I roped everyone into helping me with my sensory training,” Inojin said. “We didn’t want to interrupt because we thought you were with your dad.”

Sarada’s forehead wrinkled. “What? No, he’s at work. It’s just been me and Eiji.”

“Yeah.” Inojin smiled sheepishly. “I thought I sensed him out here, but I guess I’m not that good at sensory justu yet. Your dad has weird chakra, but so does Eiji, apparently.”

“But we’re done now," Mitsuki added, "so we came by to see if you guys wanted something to eat. Chocho got bored and hungry, and Boruto decided that we’re all getting Thunder Burger.”

 _Of course he did._ Sarada was getting sick of Thunder Burger, but she was starving. Using the Sharingan took a lot out of her. "Sure. I’m in.”

“You want to come, too, Eiji?” Boruto asked. “The more, the merrier.”

“I should get back to my paper soon. But I could use a bite, so I’ll walk over there with you before I head to the library. I’ve never been to Thunder Burger before.”

Boruto’s eyes lit up with the transcendent level of joy that he only felt when he got the chance to introduce someone to his favorite restaurant. Sarada did her best to hide her smile.

As they followed the group, she said in a low voice to Eiji, “Now you’ve done it. He’s gonna make you order the special, and he’ll be personally insulted if you don’t like it.”

Eiji snickered. “That’s fine. I’m sure Boruto wouldn’t lead me astray.”

The more she looked at Eiji, the more she realized how tired he looked. He seemed pale—almost gray—and there were dark circles around his eyes that she could see even around his glasses. His shoulders seemed hunched, too, like even the effort of standing up was too much energy. _He said he was sick the other day, right?_ she wondered. _Maybe it got worse?_

Eiji noticed her staring. “What’s wrong?”

“Are you feeling okay?” she asked. “No offense, but . . . .”

He pulled on another polite smile. “Oh, I’m fine. Don’t worry. The bags under my eyes are always there.”

She wasn’t sure that she believed him, but she figured it would be rude to keep pressing. Instead, she said, “That’s what my dad says, too. He says it’s genetic. And since he and I are the same person," she added glumly, "that means I'm probably screwed.”

She hadn't expected Eiji to laugh as hard at that as he did, but she found herself smiling all the same.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope everyone is staying safe and had fun (or as much fun as possible right now) celebrating whatever holidays they may celebrate this time of year!


	9. I always made such expensive mistakes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Itachi reflects on the damage he's inflicted on multiple generations of his family while he hangs out with the genin, and Jun's motive is made clear.

The night he left his family at Ichiraku, Itachi followed Jun to the woods outside the Leaf Village. They’d passed a small group of Leaf shinobi heading in the opposite direction, carrying what might have been an injured teammate on a stretcher between them, but Itachi didn’t realize the significance of that until he and Jun reached their destination, a cave high up in a rock formation.

As soon as Jun got inside the cave, the cocky little smirk slid off her face. “Mother _fucker_.”

She spent the next ten minutes alternating between walking further into the cave and then returning to the mouth to pace back and forth restlessly. He’d spent the time sitting on the floor motionless because she wasn’t letting him move.

When she paced in front of him for the fifth time, he asked for the fifth time, “What are you looking for?”

This time, instead of ignoring him, she turned to him. “Where is it?”

“Where is what?”

 _“Where is it?”_ she repeated angrily.

“Where is what?” Itachi repeated calmly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You know exactly where I’ve been all day and what I’ve been doing.”

She glared at him without answering and then went back to pacing.

He hadn’t been able to get any more information about what was going on, but it was clear that whatever she was planning had been derailed. The next day, instead of having him ask more people about the Scroll of the Ancient Healer, she forced him to avoid everybody and spend the day combing the village for whatever it was she’d lost.

He used a justu to deploy some crows to help him cover more ground—and to tail after his relatives, just to make sure nothing happened to them. Some of the crows led him to the Uchiha training grounds, where Sasuke was training Sarada, Boruto, and Mitsuki, as well as a team that Itachi quickly figured out was the new generation of Ino-Shika-Cho.

He figured that Jun must not be paying that close attention if she hadn’t stopped him from getting this close to his brother. So he also thought she wouldn’t notice if the crows just _happened_ to fly a little too close to the shinobi on the ground below him, or if the mask covering his chakra _accidentally_ slipped for just a second or two. And when his brother’s head suddenly whipped up towards the treetops in surprise, Itachi knew that his smoke signal had been received.

It was the best that he could do without attracting Jun’s attention, but Itachi knew that there were only two outcomes to this game. He was _hoping_ that Sasuke would somehow magically divine that he had been reanimated and was in distress and would come help him. But the more probable outcome was that Itachi was going to spend several days scaring the ever-loving shit out of his little brother by sending targeted, subtle hints of his existence that only Sasuke would be able to decode, thus convincing Sasuke that he was either losing his mind or being haunted by the ghost of his dead brother. After a certain point, Sasuke would almost definitely snap and go looking for Itachi, which would ultimately reveal that Itachi had been reanimated and achieve the desired end-goal. But Itachi wasn’t happy about the days that would come in between that he’d have to spend terrorizing his younger brother.

He hated that all he had ever done for Sasuke was terrorize him.

Below him, the kids were looking up at the crows, and Sasuke suddenly leapt into the treetops. Like a puppet on a string, Itachi felt Jun pulling him away, and he was gone before Sasuke even landed. The crows scattered, but Itachi made sure to have at least two circle back to continue watching over his brother and his niece for him.

* * *

The following day, Jun—apparently distracted by her failure at retrieving whatever she’d lost—set Itachi on a slightly looser leash. Itachi sent out three teams of crows: one each to trail his brother, his sister-in-law, and his niece. Naturally, Sasuke and Sakura were both busy talking to higher-ups in the village, which meant that Jun would stop him if he tried to go anywhere near them. Instead, he followed the crows to Sarada, who was training by herself.

He had been shocked to see that his niece had the Sharingan. He had, in fact, already assumed that she _didn’t_ have it. Because why _would_ she—in this, the best possible future timeline? In a world where Naruto was the Hokage, Sasuke had redeemed himself, and the Great Nations were at peace, what could have happened to cause Sarada know suffering?

It didn’t help that he was pretty sure that she was hiding part of the story from him. For that matter, he was also worried by the questions she’d asked him in exchange, questions about where to find meaning in the ruins of the clan he’d left behind.

All those years ago, he had thought that he could deliberately cause long-term psychological damage to Sasuke in order to save him, to manipulate him into becoming a good person even if it was purely out of spite towards his big brother. Of course, as soon as he’d heard that Sasuke had defected from the village, he’d understood that all he’d achieved was breaking his brother’s brain.

But he hadn’t realized until now that the damage would be permanent. He hadn’t realized that even a reformed version of Sasuke would still be affected by the scars that had been inflicted on him as a child.

And he especially hadn’t realized that his choices could traumatize someone who was nearly two decades away from being born when he made them. Even Sarada hadn’t been able to escape the suffering that the Uchiha seemed to attract to them like magnets, and Itachi knew that a significant portion of the blame for that probably fell on him.

But at least things were different for Sarada than they had been for him or Sasuke. Sarada seemed like a bright, well-adjusted, mostly happy child. And more importantly, she had time to turn things around—time that Sasuke and Itachi hadn’t been given.

And Itachi had time now, too. He didn’t deserve a chance to make amends, but he’d gotten one—however briefly, in whatever limited way. And as long as he had it, he would do everything in his power to make sure that Sarada had the shot at life that he and Sasuke hadn’t. It felt like the bare minimum of what he owed to his family in terms of an apology.

Whatever Jun was intending, he would protect the Leaf Village and his family. This time, he would find a way to save them both.

* * *

Jun had been the one to accept the kids’ lunch invitation. Itachi wasn’t sure why, but he could use the food and the mental break, so he went with it.

If he was being honest, at least part of the reason Itachi was going along with the lunch invitation was because he couldn’t remember the last time he’d just _hung out_. You didn’t “hang out” with the Akatsuki as much as you waited around until the other members either died or betrayed you. And before he joined the Akatsuki, he’d been playing double agent for the clan and the village, and there hadn’t exactly been a lot of free time to go get burgers with Shisui or Izumi back then.

Even when he was little, he couldn’t remember doing this. He didn’t think that the kids from his Academy class had formed a group that had stayed together after graduation the way that Sarada and her friends had, but he couldn’t actually remember.

He’d been so much younger than all the other kids. He’d only been six when he’d graduated the Academy. He’d been eight when his teammates died. Ten by the time he made chunin, eleven by the time he joined ANBU. By the time he was Sarada's age . . . .

So Itachi couldn’t bring himself to reject the chance to have an afternoon off for the first time in so many years. Even if he knew that it wasn't really time off, and that nothing good could come from Jun allowing him— _wanting_ him—so close to the genin.

Just as Sarada had warned him that he would, Boruto had ordered Itachi the combo special—which Itachi honestly had to admit was pretty good. There weren’t enough tables left in the restaurant, so they’d set up outside on a semicircular set of benches. Mitsuki was seated on one side of Itachi, and Sarada was on the other.

Shortly after they started eating, two more young shinobi approached them. One of them was the other boy who’d been training with the genin the day before, and the other was a young woman who Itachi thought looked familiar, although he couldn’t figure out why until Boruto introduced them.

“This is our new friend Eiji,” he said to them. “Eiji, these are my two favorite chunin: Shikadai Nara and Mirai Sarutobi.”

“That’s very sweet, Boruto,” Mirai had teased. “Too bad you’re my least favorite genin.”

 _Sarutobi._ It wasn’t until he heard the name that Itachi realized that the girl looked like Kurenai, which meant that her father was Asuma Sarutobi. Who had been killed by Hidan, another member of the Akatsuki, probably before his daughter was even born.

Itachi didn’t even have anything to do with Asuma’s death, but he felt complicit. He could have stopped Hidan if he really wanted to, but he hadn’t, because it would have been inconvenient for him. And now Mirai stood before him, her life upended by another unintended consequence of Itachi’s actions.

“How’s the escort mission going?” Sarada asked them.

“Oh, ask Mirai how it’s going,” Shikadai said pointedly. “Ask her how she’s getting along with the Feudal Lord’s _extremely_ pretty niece.”

Mirai smacked his shoulder.

Boruto waggled his eyebrows. “We’ll take Shikadai off your hands if you’re sick of having a third wheel.”

Mirai smacked his shoulder, too. “I’m not gonna let you dorks get in my head. This is an important mission. I’m taking this seriously.” She rounded on Shikadai. “You should, too, you know, now that you're a chunin.”

“Oh yeah, _very_ serious escort mission. Both of us big, strong chunin are being _super_ serious—”

“Shut up.”

Shikadai nodded back towards the restaurant. “Why don’t you girls take a break inside? I’ll stay out here and stand guard or whatever.”

Mirai looked like she wanted to say something sarcastic, but also like she was worried that he’d revoke the offer if she did. “We’ll be in the restaurant. But then we’re back to—”

“I know. Back to the mission. Super serious.” He saluted her.

Mirai glared at him one last time before she headed back into the restaurant.

Shikadai, smiling, took a seat in between Boruto and Inojin and stuffed his hand in Inojin’s carton of fries.

“Did they really stick two chunin on a babysitting mission?” Boruto asked.

Shikadai shoved a fry in his mouth and shrugged. “It’s a drag, but that’s what happens in times of peace, I guess. What else are you going to do with your high-level shinobi besides show them off in front of important guests to help the village swing its dick around?” He clasped his hands together behind his head. “Also, I _suspect_ that my dad pulled some strings to hook Mirai up, but then remembered that that would require Mirai to have any kind of social awareness whatsoever, so he sent me to be her wingman.”

“And the two of them are hitting it off?” Sarada asked.

“Honestly, yeah. I’m trying to figure out how to get pulled off the mission so they can have some alone time.”

Inojin snorted. “As if you need an excuse to try to find a way out of doing work.”

“I’m serious,” Shikadai said. “My dad used to be my mom’s chaperone when she would come here on behalf of the Sand, and that’s how they got together. I figure it might work again.”

“Either way, I guess sticking you on a babysitting mission is the chunin equivalent of giving the rest of us another pity day off, right?” Mitsuki said.

Itachi snorted. “A pity day off?” He had been wondering why the genin seemed to have so much free time.

Boruto nodded. “They gave us a break for a few days, which is theoretically because our jonin leaders are out on a mission together. But we also think it’s because they feel bad for us because our most recent missions turned into logistical nightmares. Our mission”—he gestured to Team Seven—"got extended by a week and ended with us being stranded between villages while the Thunder Rail was broken down, and Team Ten found that dead girl outside the village on their way back from their mission.”

Jun suddenly took over Itachi’s voice. “What about a dead girl?”

“We found a body in the woods two days ago, when we were coming back from a mission,” Inojin said. “It was, as you might expect, not the most pleasant way to end a mission.”

“I think there’s a difference when it’s someone younger,” Chocho said. For the first time all day, there was a note of seriousness in her voice. “There’s seeing adult shinobi go down, and then there’s seeing someone our age who didn’t do anything wrong. I’m not even sure she was a shinobi.”

Sarada put her hand on Chocho’s shoulder to comfort her.

“What happened to her?” Jun asked through Itachi. “Where is she now?”

And that was when Itachi’s insides went cold. _The thing that Jun is missing is a_ body _?_

“The hospital morgue, presumably,” Sarada said. “My mom said they performed the autopsy yesterday."

“Do they know what happened to her?” Jun asked.

“They think she was sick. It seems like they’re less confused about the cause of death and more confused about who would have moved her there and why.”

“Yeah, the place where we found her was a very weird place for somebody to end up by accident,” Inojin added.

Itachi did not like any of these revelations one bit. He didn’t want to know how Jun had procured this body in the first place, and he didn’t want to know what she was planning to do with it if she got it back. It was bad enough that Jun had one dead body walking around the village to do her bidding for her. He didn’t want to know what she was planning to do with a second.

“It’s been a real shitshow,” Chocho said. “But if we can appreciate silver linings in spite of the occasional shittiness of our missions—which I think we would all agree is healthy—then I’m glad that at least we got to do some training with Sarada’s hot dad on our time off.”

Itachi had just taken a sip of soda as soon as she started talking, and it nearly went out his nose.

“Yeah,” Shikadai said, “I always find it very helpful to train shuriken jutsu with Sarada’s hot dad.”

Inojin made a show of stretching out one of his shoulders. “Sarada’s hot dad sure is a drill sergeant, though.”

Sarada’s cheeks puffed out in anger. She looked like Sasuke had when he was a little kid throwing a temper tantrum about something, and Itachi couldn’t help but grin. “For the last time,” she said, sounding physically pained, “I am _begging_ all of you to stop referring to him as ‘Sarada’s hot dad.’”

* * *

When they were finished eating, Itachi walked with Sarada, Boruto, and Mitsuki along the river. While Boruto and Mitsuki walked up front, Boruto telling some story to Mitsuki with some overly-animated hand gestures, Sarada and Itachi walked in the back.

He hadn’t realized how much he missed having a mini-me. It wasn’t the same thing as when Sasuke had been little-little and would follow him everywhere, and he could tell that Sarada still wasn’t sure what to make of him. (Which was not an incorrect instinct, since he was very much the reanimated corpse of a former member of a terrorist organization.) But it was still kind of nice to have a fun younger relative to hang out with again, as if he and Sasuke had gotten to grow up together and be young adults at the same time.

“I asked my mom about the Scroll of the Ancient Healer last night,” Sarada said to him.

“What did she say?” Jun asked through him. She came out immediately, almost like she was reminding Itachi that she was always watching, even when he was lulled into a false sense of security.

“My mom made it sound like it’s a bootleg version of the Reanimation Justu, basically,” Sarada explained. “Like, from the war, when they brought the dead shinobi back.”

“Yes, I’m familiar with that one,” Itachi said dryly.

Mitsuki turned to walk backwards to face them. “I also asked my parent about the Scroll. I don’t really care either way, but my parent wanted to know _exactly_ what it was about the Scroll that you’re interested in.”

Jun didn’t come to help him out on that one, possibly because—in spite of how Mitsuki started his sentence—there seemed to be a little bit of accusation in the question. “Oh, you know, just any information I can get about it,” Itachi said.

“Wait, when did you have time to go home to talk to your parent between yesterday and today?” Boruto asked Mitsuki.

Mitsuki smiled at the group without saying anything for a second. Then he turned and looked out towards the water. “Sarada, I think your parents are over there.”

Boruto instantly took the bait and turned. “Oh, yeah!”

Itachi was rapidly developing a _long_ list of questions about Mitsuki. He glanced at Sarada, who just rolled her eyes and waved her hand as if to say, _Don’t worry about it._ Then she, too, turned to look at her parents.

Sasuke and Sakura were standing on the edge of a dock jutting out into the river. Itachi couldn’t see either of their faces—they were too far away—but it seemed like they were talking seriously about something.

Itachi wondered if his brother also thought of their father teaching them the Fireball Justu when he stood on a dock. He wondered if his brother had taught the Fireball Jutsu to Sarada. If that was the kind of thing that Itachi would’ve been able to teach Sarada if he’d survived long enough to be her fun uncle.

The crows he’d sent to tail after Sakura and Sasuke both were roosting in some trees behind them. Since Itachi was standing behind the genin, he knew that they wouldn’t be able to see as he weaved a hand sign that sent all of the crows flying over his brother and sister-in-law’s heads—and because now was not the time for subtlety, he arranged them in a formation that looked as much like the Uchiha crest as one could arrange with a decent, but limited, number of birds.

He could see his brother’s shoulders stiffen even from a distance as his brother’s gaze followed the crows out over the water and towards the horizon. But Sakura put her hand on Sasuke’s back and said something to him, and slowly, his shoulders relaxed back down.

Itachi felt that pang of not-quite-homesickness again. He knew that companionship was one of the many joys he'd sacrificed in order to do what needed to be done, and it was a sacrifice he'd made willingly. But he still felt a kind of emptiness when he was reminded of the kinds of life experiences that he would never get to have, the experiences that were reserved for those who survived the shinobi world. He found himself thinking of Izumi again.

On the dock, Sakura smiled and turned to walk away. But as Sasuke turned to look back out at the horizon, Sakura—seemingly impulsively—turned back and nudged the back of Sasuke’s knee with her foot.

Sasuke’s leg gave way, but before he could fall off the edge, he looked over his shoulder. Suddenly he was back on the dock where Sakura had been standing—and Sakura, shrieking, tumbled into the water.

Boruto and Sarada burst out into hysterical laughter.

“What was _that_?” Boruto squawked.

Sarada was laughing so hard she was crying, and she wiped a tear away from her eye. “Things have been weird for a couple of days, and I think that was her attempt at cheering him up.”

“Is everything okay?” Mitsuki asked.

“Yeah, it’s fine.” She paused, and then she added, “We can talk about it later.”

Sakura resurfaced and spat out a mouthful of water, and Sasuke knelt at the edge of the dock and—in a departure from the rigid, overly proper ways he and Itachi had always been taught to behave—flipped his wife off. Sakura cackled, and as she swam back to the dock, Sasuke bent lower and held out his hand to help her climb out. Sakura took hold of his hand—and then quickly grabbed his forearm with her other hand and pulled with all of her might, sending him tumbling into the water on top of her.

Boruto snorted again. “It’s disgusting to watch parents be cutesy with each other.”

“It’s _nice,_ ” Sarada insisted. “My parents won’t be cutesy if they know other people are watching. But I just hope that little comedy bit was worth all the chakra he just burned on the Rinnegan.”

“How did your father get the Rinnegan?” Itachi asked. The X-Card that Boruto had given him hadn’t explained.

“It was given to him during the war, I think—" Sarada started.

“Wait, it’s a thing you can be _given_?” Boruto asked, looking hopeful. “Can Sasuke give the Rinnegan to _me?_ I got screwed on the kekkei genkai front.”

“I don’t think it works like that, exactly,” Sarada said. “If it’s like the Sharingan, he’d have to give you the whole eyeball.”

Boruto did not look in the least bit discouraged. “Wait. Do you think Sasuke’d give _you_ his Rinnegan eyeball someday? Like as an inheritance?”

Sarada made a face. “Boruto, that’s _disgusting._ I don’t want to talk about someone taking my dad’s eyeballs out of his head when he dies.”

He leaned in closer and wiggled his eyebrows at her. “What do you think eyeballs feel like? I bet they feel like grapes.”

“ _Stoooooop,_ ” Sarada whined, pushing him away from her.

Itachi bit back a dark chuckle. It was almost quaint that she was so repulsed. When he was close to the age she was now, Shishui had torn out his eyeball in front of him before hurling himself off a cliff. And he’d left his eyes for Sasuke to take when Sasuke wasn’t that much older than Sarada was now.

“As much as I'm enjoying this conversation about eyeballs," Sarada continued, "it’s time for me to head out. My parents’ clothes are going to be soaking wet, and I have to make sure they go home and put on dry clothes before they catch colds.” She looked specifically at Itachi. “It was nice to talk to you again, Eiji.”

"Likewise."

She smiled at him, and then she turned and headed for the dock.

“You don’t catch colds from being cold!” Boruto called after her. “Your mom is a medical ninja! You should know that!”

Without turning around, Sarada flapped her hand in the air dismissively.

Itachi thought that all of it was so cute. That the three of them had the time to bicker so playfully. That they had parents who they got along with, whose deaths were an unthinkable, distant nightmare not to be broached until adulthood—whose deaths they would never be asked to be responsible for. They were all so happy now. So _cute_.

Itachi turned away from them.

“You’re leaving, too?” Mitsuki asked him.

“I’ll find you guys tomorrow,” he said. He started to walk away, and then he stopped. “They don’t feel like grapes.”

“What?” Boruto asked.

“Eyeballs. They’re squishier. And bigger than you’d expect them to be.”

He kept walking, but he heard Boruto say, in a flat and not quite quiet enough voice, “ _Whaaaat_ in the hell _. . ._?”

* * *

Late that night Jun led Itachi to the hospital, and the two of them quickly and quietly extracted the body of a teenage girl from the morgue. They’d brought the body back to Jun’s hideout, and Jun had laid it down on the ground of the cave as gently and lovingly as if it were a child she were putting back to sleep.

Itachi realized quickly that his interpretation of Jun’s interest in the body had been incorrect. He’d suspected that her zany villain schtick had been an act, but he didn’t know if she’d ever intended for him to see her this way, with her heart cracked open wide, as she stared at the girl's face.

“Who is she?” he asked. Not for the first time that night, but she’d ignored him all of the other times. This time, he added slightly more gently, “I can only help you if you tell me.”

Jun was still kneeling beside the body. She didn’t turn to look at him, but she finally spoke. “My kid sister.”

Even in spite of himself, Itachi felt a wave of sympathy wash over him. He knew very well what it was like to feel like you had failed your younger siblings. “When did she die?”

“A few days ago.” Jun wiped at her face. “Our parents died right after the war, and I basically raised Kazumi from the time she was a toddler. It was hard, but we were happy. And then she got sick.”

The wave crashed over him again. Itachi also knew what it was to have your body turn against you.

“It all happened so quickly,” Jun said. “People who live in the great villages don’t understand what it’s like for the people on the outside. There was no way I could’ve helped her. We didn’t have any money, and there were no doctors, and . . . if we had left to head this way just a couple of weeks earlier, maybe we could’ve made it to the Leaf on time, but . . . . ” She brushed more tears away from her eyes. “But as soon as she got sick, I told her that I’d find a way to bring her back if it came down to it, and we could just pretend that all of this never happened. I knew that there was a way besides the Edo Tensei. I didn’t have the Scroll, but I knew what the stories were, and I thought I could figure it out.” She took a breath. “It didn’t work right. It healed her body, but it didn’t bring her soul back. It was just enough to move her here, and then I released the jutsu.”

So that was what the Scroll was for. A bootleg Reanimation Justu, as Sarada had called it. “Why not just use the Edo Tensei? You clearly know how to—”

She finally looked over her shoulder at him, her eyes bright with anger. “I don’t want her to be like _you_. Just a fucking puppet brought back to life. I just needed to test the Edo Tensei to make sure it worked as a backup plan, and to know that I had a reliable second set of hands around if I needed them.” Jun looked back at the coffin. “That’s not what I want for Kazumi. I want her back the way she was.”

“She wouldn’t want this, Jun,” Itachi said. “Nobody wants this.”

“Well, forgive me for not getting advice on what my younger sibling would or wouldn’t want from _Itachi fucking Uchiha_.” She stood up and turned to face him fully, and he saw more tears rolling down her face. “Why do you think I picked _you_ to test the Reanimation Jutsu on? Do you think I care if your soul rests peacefully or not? You had _everything_ in the world, and you threw it all away for nothing. You killed the family that loved you and threw the little brother who adored you to the wolves. Your soul doesn’t deserve peace, and I don’t mind being the one who drags you out of the afterlife to make sure you never find it.”

Itachi felt the same sting he’d always felt whenever his crimes were thrown in his face. He knew that this was intentionally how he’d shaped his legacy, but it still felt like a stab to the chest to be told he had made his worst choices out of cruelty and callousness and not out of pure desperation to try to stop a volcano that was already erupting.

But then again, even in the most generous interpretation of his life story, he had still set Sasuke up to fail. Had still left Sarada nothing but a shattered kingdom that she would have to rebuild alone.

“Maybe I don’t deserve peace,” Itachi said. “But that doesn’t mean that you should inflict such a fate on your sister. Nor do my sins have anything to do with the living members of my family. You can do whatever you want to punish me, but my brother and his family have already suffered enough—”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s true.” Her crazed smirk was back again. “I don’t think your brother deserves peace, either. I think he’s a criminal who got a second chance he didn’t deserve just because people in power fell for his little wounded bird act. In fact, I don’t have any use for _any_ of the members of your family. I mean, your sister-in-law’s the one who ordered Kazumi’s autopsy. It’s like you don’t even have to be born in the bloodline. You just change your name to Uchiha, and instantly your purpose in life becomes to irritate me.”

Itachi felt a knot of dread growing in his stomach. “Leave them out of this.”

“Why? What has the Uchiha clan done to deserve a do-over, when so many other people who have done nothing wrong have been left to die? What has the entire Leaf Village done to earn peace after _everything_ it’s inflicted on the world—”

“I’ll kill you—”

Instantaneously he found himself forced to his knees, and then on his stomach. Jun planted a foot hard into the center of his back.

Itachi knew that Jun wouldn’t kill him yet, but he still felt an all-too-familiar terror wash over him: the terror that someone had run out the clock on him without his noticing, that it was already too late to stop the storm that was coming before it struck.

“I’m not very concerned with what _you’re_ going to do,” Jun told him. “You’re going to stay here tonight like a good boy, and then tomorrow we’ll go see how your family and all your new little friends are doing. After all, it would appear that I’m in need of a new sacrifice, and I think I know _just_ the girl to fit the bill.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! Sorry this one is so long and also that it took so long to post! If there is another long wait between this chapter and the next one, it's because actual real-life deadlines got in the way. But it is fully my intention to finish this story and not to leave it on a cliffhanger forever, so there will be more chapters ~eventually~.
> 
> Thank you again to everyone who has shown their support for this and given me something fun to pour my energy into in These Trying Times! I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy.


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